MaxRedline

Nope, Not Cold Hookers

Hoar Frost is totally different (and likely prettier):

It's basically supercooled fog that becomes solid upon contact with trees, power lines, grass, and similar items at freezing temperatures. It doesn't generally affect roads, as it's really a transient phenomenon that melts away rapidly.

As for the term "hoar" it comes from the Old English word "har", meaning gray, venerable, old. The term came into use over time due to the phenomenon's supposed resemblance to an old man's beard. Naturally, the word was eventually bastardized into the present "hoar".

You're welcome.

 

At Least We Won't Need To Bomb Them

The ground is shifting under Iran's capital, Tehran, home to approximately 15 million people and the biggest city by population in western Asia. High-resolution satellite images recently revealed that in some places, the metropolis of the Middle East is sinking about 10 inches (25 centimeters) per year.

Just let them keep doing what they're doing; they'll be too busy trying to shore things up to worry about shooting missiles at the USA.

A side effect of the subsidence is the sudden appearance of giant cracks and sinkholes in some areas. In one case, a farmer was trapped for hours in a 20-foot-deep (6 meters) sinkhole after a crack opened where he was standing, Ali Beitollahi, head of engineering seismology at the Building and Housing Research Center in Tehran, told Nature.

Nature will take care of them.

 

What Has More Germs Than A Toilet Seat?

Pretty much everything. In brief, you're never home alone. Showerheads, in particular, generally harbor massive colonies of Mycobacteria. So while you think you're getting refreshingly clean, you might want to re-think that.

In essence, the bacteria poop a little indestructible condominium in your pipes, built of hard-to-break-down complex carbohydrates. But when the pressure is high enough, these species are let loose into the fine aerosol spray of water droplets pelting our hair and bodies and splashing up and into our noses and mouths.

Comforting, is it not?

 

Still Not Dead Yet

Unless you've been shot in the head (or something equally traumatic), you're probably not dead yet. Time of death is generally determined by when your heart stops, which is why coroners use body temperature, lividity, and other markers to determine approximately when someone died, long after the fact.

Yet the brain keeps processing data for a while, which explains why some folks who are somehow resuscitated manage to recount what was going on immediately following their deaths.

We know we are dead when we die because our brains keep working to make us aware of what’s happening around us, new research suggests. This means you are essentially “trapped” inside your dead body with your brain still working, if only for a short time. Survivors of cardiac arrest were aware of what was going on around them while they were “dead” before being “brought back to life”, the study revealed.

More surprising still, there is evidence to suggest the deceased may even hear themselves being pronounced dead by doctors.

It's the stuff of science fiction, except that it doesn't seem to be fictional.

Sweet dreams!

 

On Standing

When you get vertical, your body has to compensate for the changes. Otherwise, you'd just fall over. It's something we tend not to think about, but it all comes down to a couple of proteins and nervous system features that are critical for successfully standing, walking, and so on.

Due to the sudden drop in blood pressure, special neurons called baroreceptors swing into action to compensate – and scientists just figured out more about how they operate. Scripps Research Institute has pinpointed two proteins that sense blood pressure and control the baroreceptor response.

Yep, that's kind of important if you want to do anything more than slither.

 

Actually, It's A Man Thing, But...

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — A new study has found that people that are shorter tend to be angrier and more violent than people that are tall.

The study only involved 600 men, though, so can hardly be regarded as definitive.

Perhaps the Munchkins were exceptions, perhaps not.

Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason to live

They got little hands
Little eyes
They walk around tellin' great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet

-Randy Newman

Feelings of inadequacy, perhaps?

 

Nice News For Nancy

Contrary to long-held belief, aging brain cells can, in fact, still grow - and even regenerate new cells. This is great news for old lifer politicians like Pelosi, although there is a catch: for one thing, you actually need a brain.

A new report in the journal Cell Stem Cell reveals there is a trick to it.

Huntington Hospital Neurologist Dr. Yafa Minazad said brain cells do die off as we age but, "There is an opportunity for the brain cells to regenerate unlike what we used to think," she said.

For this to work out, you first need a brain and a functional blood supply. I reckon that's bad news for lifer politicians.

 

Sorry, We're Closed. Alien Outside Should've Told Ya.

FBI agents showed up at the Sunspot solar observatory in tiny Sunspot, New Mexico, on Friday and shut down the facility, evacuating the local area, including the town post office. 

"There was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers, but nobody would tell us anything," Otero County Sheriff Benny House told the Alamogordo Daily News. "I don't know why the FBI would get involved so quick and not tell us anything."

Five days later, the observatory's website confirms the entire facility is closed to both staff and the public until further notice.

All that they're saying at the moment is that there's some sort of security issue there. Maybe the FBI lovers can get involved so they can "leak" the story for us.

 

 

Spook Stuff

From the gee-whiz file:

While vacationing on the coast of Spain in 2012, the computer vision scientist Antonio Torralba noticed stray shadows on the wall of his hotel room that didn’t seem to have been cast by anything. Torralba eventually realized that the discolored patches of wall weren’t shadows at all, but rather a faint, upside-down image of the patio outside his window. The window was acting as a pinhole camera — the simplest kind of camera, in which light rays pass through a small opening and form an inverted image on the other side. The resulting image was barely perceptible on the light-drenched wall. But it struck Torralba that the world is suffused with visual information that our eyes fail to see.

Even the edge of a shadow, he and colleagues found, can reveal what's just around that corner ahead of you. Even a houseplant can be used to eavesdrop:

Last fall, they and their collaborators reported that they can spot someone moving on the other side of a corner by filming the ground near the corner. This summer, they demonstrated that they can film a houseplant and then reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the rest of the room from the disparate shadows cast by the plant’s leaves. Or they can turn the leaves into a “visual microphone,” magnifying their vibrations to listen to what’s being said.

As might be expected, DARPA's interested; they've ponied up $27 million to advance the research. So they've moved up to lasers and what they call "active non-line-of-sight imaging":

The light bounces off a wall, then strikes a hidden object, and then light reflected from the object is bounced back to its point of origin. This enables construction of a 3-D representation of what's back there:

This is some really weird science.

 

Jurassic Park - Russia

Reportedly, Russia plans to construct a cloning facility in the world's coldest city, Yakutsk, in the remote north-east of the country. The plan is to work with other scientists "to study extinct animals from living cells - and to restore such creatures as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave lion and breeds of long-gone horses". 

It seems a bit far-fetched, but it appears that they want to try it, nonetheless.