Month: December 2016

The Yule Log, a looped video of a wood-burning fireplace set to classic Christmas songs, has been a holiday staple for 50 years. But in a TV landscape dominated by angry pundits and Real Housewives, how did the sleepy footage become such cherished Christmastime viewing? 

In 1966, Fred Thrower, the manager of WPIX-TV Channel 11 in New York City, wanted the station to do “something a little different and special” that Christmas Eve. On November 2, he circulated a memo to his station’s staff, proposing that the station cancel all programs and commercials in order to air a WPIX Christmas Card, consisting of a video loop of a holiday-inspired fireplace. Thrower also suggested asking WPIX’s affiliated radio station, WPIX-FM, to provide an accompanying festive soundtrack.

Thrower’s concept came to life on December 24, 1966, when WPIX first aired three hours of a continuous 17-second film loop of an ornate fireplace. WPIX had filmed the fireplace at Gracie Mansion, the home of New York City’s mayor, and paired the film loop with Christmas hits from singers like Percy Faith and Nat King Cole. The Yule Log was a huge ratings success, and turning viewers’ TVs into makeshift fireplaces also turned out to be a win-win: New Yorkers in apartments without fireplaces could feel cozy and warm, and more WPIX employees could spend Christmas at home with their families instead of working at the station.

A few years later, in 1970, realizing the original 16mm film of the Gracie Mansion fireplace was deteriorating, WPIX filmed a similar-looking fireplace in Palo Alto, California. Shot on 35mm film, the new video was seven minutes long, making the fireplace loop footage less jerky than the original. For the next two decades, WPIX aired the Yule Log every Christmas—and won its time slot year after year.

Fred’s son, Mitch Thrower, told mental_floss that his dad “was the most creative man I have ever known.” Explaining the log’s appeal, Mitch says the program came to have “sentimental value for millions of people … The Yule Log allowed us all to gather around the same fireplace, and listen to the same music. There has always been something uniquely comforting in that shared moment.”

FANNING THE FLAMES

In 1990, the Yule Log’s fire finally went out after network executives deemed the commercial-free program too expensive to air. But folks who grew up beside the log’s glow just couldn’t let go. Fast-forward a decade, and fans of the Yule Log created an online petition, appropriately titled “Bring Back The Log.” In December 2001, nostalgia won out, and WPIX resumed airing the Yule Log. Since 2003, WPIX’s parent company, Tribune Broadcasting, has aired the show not just in New York City, but on stations across the country.

In 2009, the Yule Log expanded from a three-hour program to four hours, after Lawrence “Chip” Arcuri produced a new fourth hour of classic Christmas music for the WPIX show.

Over the years, the Yule Log has taken on a life all its own. Besides ambient fireplace copycat videos on YouTube, Netflix, and iOS/Android apps, the Yule Log now has a strong social media presence. Whatever device you watch your Yule Log on, the flames are an annual opportunity to pause and reflect, to be together with family, and to feel the (figurative) warmth of the holiday season.

Soft, pliable robots are charting new terrain in engineering, allowing machines to replicate the flexibility of biological appendages like octopus limbs and human hands. Now, a new robot design created at Harvard is even more dexterous than previous technologies. It can replicate the uber-complex movements of human joints, bending and twisting like a finger, wrist, or knee.

When you bend your thumb in toward your wrist, it’s not just a single movement; that makes it difficult for a machine to mimic. Recreating organic movement in an artificial body requires multiple actuators, the part of a machine that controls a movement. “The design is so complicated because one actuator type is not enough to produce complex motions,” Fionnuala Connolly, one of the paper’s authors and a graduate student in Harvard’s engineering program, said in a press statement. “You need a sequence of actuator segments, each performing a different motion.”

The Harvard engineers tackled this problem by created a mathematical model of a fluid-powered movement. They used this model to design a finger-like soft robot that can bend and twist at the same time in response to only one pressure source.

This type of robotic design could be used in the future to create robotic arms or wearables that assist with human movement. The research paper is available in PNAS.

Chicagoans preparing for holiday feasts this week are in luck: Any food that doesn’t fit in the freezer can just be left outside. The Windy City has been sustaining temperatures colder than most parts of Earth—and, as DNAInfo reports, all of Mars.

The record for lowest temperature in Chicago was set on December 19, 1983, at a blistering -14 degrees Fahrenheit. But 33 years later to the day, that record was nearly broken, as the frozen city reached -13°F overnight. With wind chill, that number dropped to -30°F. By comparison, the surface of Mars looked positively toasty at a comfortable -2°F.

Today’s forecast high temps across much of Canada and the upper midwest are colder than the last reported high from Mars by @MarsCuriosity pic.twitter.com/bGYWG3yIOa

— Mars Weather (@MarsWxReport) December 15, 2016

The brutal cold in Chicago has prompted the closing of more than 300 area schools and the cancellation of dozens of flights, and has slowed local trains. There are a few places on the planet that are colder—the North Pole, for example—but most of them are sparsely populated, if anyone lives there at all.

Temperatures began to thaw by Tuesday, December 20, but if Monday’s freeze was any indication, Chicago residents are going to be in for one heck of a winter.

The sooner we can get over this whole “healthy = expensive” thing, the better off we’ll be. Researchers say not only are we more likely to believe that expensive food is good for us, but we also assume health claims on expensive foods are more trustworthy and important. Their report is forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Marketing experts designed a series of online experiments to understand how our beliefs about the cost of food affect our thoughts and behavior. Each experiment addressed one of five primary questions:

1. Do we actually believe that expensive food is healthier?
2. Do we believe the reverse is true (that healthy food is more expensive)?
3. Does a desire to eat healthier make us more likely to choose more expensive options?
4. Do health claims on more expensive foods increase our concern about the issue in question?
5. Does the cost of a product influence how likely we are to trust its health claims?

You can probably guess the answers to the first two questions: yes and also yes. Participants were shown two hypothetical brands of granola and told to select which one they thought was healthier. In the absence of any other information, people were far more likely to select the more expensive brand. And when participants in the second experiment were told one brand was healthier, they were more likely to assume it was also more expensive.

In the third experiment, participants were told to imagine that a coworker had asked them to order her a healthy lunch. They were then given the choice between a “Roasted Chicken Wrap” and a “Balsamic Chicken Wrap.” One was priced at $6.95, the other at $8.95. Regardless of the wrap’s ingredients, study participants consistently selected whichever was more expensive. The authors say this shows that people concerned with eating well are more likely to spend more money on their food even when they have no evidence it’ll buy them the healthiest option.

Participants in the fourth experiment were shown four types of trail mix, some of which claimed to help prevent a relatively obscure vision problem called age-related macular degeneration. Some trail mix types claimed that a familiar ingredient (vitamin A) supported eye health, while others touted a lesser known ingredient (DHA) that also supported eye health. The participants were then asked to guess how much each type of trail mix would cost, and how important they considered vitamin A or DHA.

The less familiar the participants were with the ingredient, the more likely they were to assume it would be expensive—and important. The people who were shown an expensive trail mix containing DHA were also more likely to say they’d be interested in starting to take a DHA supplement, especially if they’d never heard of DHA before.

For the final experiment, participants were asked to rate a new (imaginary) snack claiming to be the “healthiest protein bar on the planet.” They were told that the average cost of a protein bar was $2. Some people were told the new product cost $0.99, while others were told it cost $4. Then everyone was given the opportunity to fact-check the bar’s health claims by reading other product reviews.

Participants with the $0.99 bar did some research, reading an average of three reviews before making a decision. Those with the $4 bar read only two. “People just couldn’t believe that the ‘healthiest protein bar on the planet’ would cost less than the average bar,” study co-author Rebecca Reczek of the Ohio State University said in a statement. “They had to read more to convince themselves this was true. They were much more willing to accept that the healthy bar would cost twice as much as average.”

It is true that some healthy foods really are more expensive than their less-nutritious counterparts. Processed food is often cheaper than fresh produce or individual ingredients. But this is hardly a universal truth—and just because something claims to be “healthy” doesn’t mean that it is.

A caveat: Four out of five of these experiments were conducted on college students. The study size averaged about 176 people, which is not huge. More research will be needed to confirm these results.

Still, “anyone trying to manage their food budgets and feel good about the healthiness of their family meals may well pay too much for their nutrition,” say the authors. “This can occur despite ready availability of both pricing and nutritional information, due to the busy and often hurried consumer sacrificing health while attempting to balance budgets.”