Politics ... Skin Deep

From Discover Magazine:

Researchers are making the case that a person’s political views cause them to see with a tinted perspective.

Scientists showed undergraduate students a series of digitally darkened or lightened photos of President Barack Obama last fall, and asked them which photos best represented him as a person ... while self-described liberals tended to pick the digitally lightened photos of the president, self-described conservative students more frequently picked the darkened images. The more one agrees with a politician, in other words, the lighter his skin tone seems; the less you agree, the darker it becomes [Newsweek].

Tweeting with Your Brain

"Locked in syndrome" is a condition where an individual is fully conscious but unable to communicate due to complete body paralysis. The condition is a bit different than ALS (Lou Gherig's disease) but with similar devastating effects.

Adam Wilson, however, has developed a novel method which may one day allow such people full communication abilities — by merely thinking to use Twitter. While wearing a cap with electrodes monitoring changes in brain activity, Wilson is able to tell the computer which character he wants to select, eventually forming a 'tweet'.


Here's a video.

World's Greatest Paper Airplane

Without cuts or glue and one sheet of paper, Takuo Toda has set the world record for the longest paper airplane flight - 27.63 seconds.

If you want to build the same airplane, see the instructional video.

Teleportation - Seriously.

For the first time ever information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter.

Teleportation, unlike any other communication, occurs when no information actually pass between points - that is it does not pass through a physical medium. Instead, the information disappears and reappears from point A to point B. It has occurred between other particles but none offers a means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances.

While the days of Star Trek are still a ways away, the discovery has promise for a quantum computer which could perform certain tasks (encryption-related calculations, searches of giant databases) much faster than conventional machines.

Judging a Book by its ... SMELL???

There's a certain smell to old books and a new study argues that the smell could help in preservation.

The smell of old books is a result of volatile organic compounds released as paper ages. 15 organic compounds were identified to track books condition. As of now, age-testing requires snipping pieces of the paper for testing. If this new method is developed, a hand-held model would allow for a noninvasive analysis.

Bread Crumbs Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic particle accelerator used to study the building blocks of everything and revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

But it will take just a little longer for the LHC to work its magic.

A crusty chunk of bread “paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.” The bread was found on an electrical connection inside 1 of 8 above-ground buildings at the site. The mystery is how the bread got there in the first place as the cryogenic facility is under heavy guard and designed to super-chill the LHC to temperatures approaching absolute zero.

“Nobody knows,” a spokewoman states.

Birds SEE Magnetic Fields When Migrating

Migratory birds have been long known to be able to detect magnetic fields to help navigate their annal routes. The mechanism itself, however, was a mystery. Nature Magazine has published a study revealing that the European robin can actually SEE magnetic fields through the use of proteins situated in the eye's light-sensitive cells! The study also disproved the theory that iron-based cells in the birds’ beaks were the reason for detecting magnetic fields.