Chatham, Ontario—located about an hour over the border from Detroit—may not be first on your travel bucket list, but it just got a whole lot more exciting. You can now enter to win a night’s stay inside a local Taco Bell courtesy of Airbnb, as First We Feast reports.
The stay includes two bunk beds, a big screen TV, and a “Taco Bell Butler” devoted to fetching you as much fast food as you can eat. It’s called a SteakCation, so Taco Bell Canada will be providing as many of its new Steak Doubledillas as you want, but presumably you can still get a plain ol’ crunchy taco, too, if you’re so inclined. An ample supply of video games and movies will be provided. Plus, of course, you get to lay in bed and gaze lovingly at the Taco Bell kitchen, just as you always dreamed.
The stay is slated for the night of October 17. Enter here.
This week is a big week for scientists as the announcements for the 2016 Nobel Prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics roll in. On Monday, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced its choice for the Nobel Prize in medicine; on Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced its choice for the Nobel Prize in physics; and today, October 5, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Here’s a rundown of the winners across all the science categories:
CHEMISTRY
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year went to three chemists who have developed controllable molecular machines: Jean-Pierre Sauvage of the University of Strasbourg in France; Sir J. Fraser Stoddart of Northwestern University; and Bernard Feringa of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
In 1983, Sauvage interlocked two ring-shaped molecules with a mechanical bond, taking the first step toward making molecular machines. Then, in 1991, Stoddart created a molecular ring that could move along a molecular axle, later using this technique to create a molecular elevator, a molecular muscle that can bend and stretch molecular beams, and a molecular computer chip. In 1999, Feringa became the first scientist to make a molecular motor, and he has since created a nanocar and a molecular motor that can rotate a glass cylinder 10,000 times its size.
The chair of the chemistry committee explained the winners’ research in an interview after the announcement:
Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese biologist, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work understanding autophagy, the mechanism that allows cells to recycle unnecessary or dysfunctional parts.
In the 1990s, Ohsumi used baker’s yeast to pinpoint the genes involved in autophagy. He starved mutated yeast cells in order to prompt them to produce autophagosomes, or organelles that envelop damaged cell components and deliver them to another organelle to be recycled. He studied thousands of yeast mutants to identify 15 genes that need to be activated for autophagy to work, and identified the corresponding mechanisms in humans. His research led to a greater understanding of the role autophagy plays in the body’s stress response and disease.
Juleen Zierath, who is on the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, tells a freelance journalist about Ohsumi’s work in the video below:
PHYSICS
The Nobel Prize in Physics this year went to three UK-born scientists who have advanced the scientific knowledge of unusual states of matter. One-half of the $930,000 (8 million Swedish kronor) award went to David Thouless of the University of Washington, and the other half was split between F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton University and J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University.
To study states of matter, they used topology, an advanced type of math that describes the properties of matter that stay consistent when an object is stretched or deformed without tearing it apart. In topology, a sphere and a bowl are the same, because the sphere can be flattened into a bowl; a bagel and a coffee cup with a hole in the handle are the same, because they both have one hole. But a bagel and a pretzel are different, because one has one hole, and the other has two. There’s no such thing as a half-hole, so topological objects have to change by an integer—one hole, two holes, etc. Topology allowed these three researchers to rewrite what scientists knew about superconductors, superfluids, and thin magnetic films. The type of research spawned by the Laureates’ discoveries could one day lead to new superconductors or quantum computers.
Physics committee member Thors Hans Hansson explains the concept in a post-announcement interview below:
As important as superconductors are, not everyone is cheering about this year’s physics prize. With an eye on next year’s Nobel wins, some are making an online push to recognize the achievements of Vera Rubin, one of the researchers who provided the first evidence of dark matter—a revolutionary discovery by any measure. She would be the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics since 1963, and only the third in the prize’s history (despite plenty of deserving female candidates). Across the history of all the Nobel Prizes, only 48 women have won.
The Nobel announcements in other fields will be awarded later this week and next, beginning with the Nobel Peace Prize on October 7, the Nobel Prize in economics the following Monday, and the Nobel Prize for literature on a yet-to-be-announced date.
It can be hard to imagine an Internet before Outlook, much less before Facebook, but such a world did exist. Those domains, however, didn’t go unused. Facebook.com was owned by AboutFace, a directory database company, while Outlook.com belonged to a technology consultant named Andrew M. Seybold, who ran a newsletter called “Andrew Seybold’s Outlook on Communications and Computing.”
EssayRoo, an Australian essay-writing service, put together a visual history of famous domains like Dropbox.com, Uber.com, Bing.com, and iCloud.com, with screenshots of what those sites looked like before they were taken over by the companies that made them household names.
Hopefully, the original owners got paid handsomely for their domain investments, considering how much a successful company’s can be worth. For instance, Google paid about $6000 to a man that the company accidentally sold its domain to in 2015, so we know that a good URL is worth bank, even if you, like one-time Google.com owner Sanmay Ved, only have it for one minute.
Offices are notoriously bad at thermal comfort. It’s either far too hot or far too cold, regardless of outside temperatures; and often, it manages to be both at the same time—too hot for some workers and too cold for others, depending on where they sit or their gender. There may be a better way to warm up at the office than sticking a space heater under your desk. Keeping your feet comfortable could be a much more effective way of dealing with thermal issues at the office, according to The Atlantic.
As reporter Sarah Zhang writes:
Feet, it turns out, are exquisitely sensitive to temperature. When you get cold, the blood vessels in your extremities are the first to constrict, which is your body’s way of preventing more heat loss. “You feel uncomfortable because your feet get numb or getting close to numb,” says Edward Arens, an architect at the University of Berkeley, who also studies thermal comfort. If building managers could heat or cool the feet alone, they could cut energy and costs. So at Berkeley, researchers are focusing on thermal comfort from the feet up.
The models that help engineers and office managers determine a building’s air conditioning demands are based on studies of men’s metabolic rates, and assume that workers will be wearing full suits and, yes, thick socks and shoes. Meanwhile, women might come to the office in the summer in dresses and strappy sandals. No wonder it feels so chilly.
Arens is developing a foot warmer to keep people warm with an eye toward efficiency. In 2013, he and his team estimated that their Personal Comfort System could cut electricity use by 30 percent. One of Berkeley’s assistant professors of architecture, Stefano Schiavon, is studying how putting ventilation in floors rather than in ceilings could make buildings more comfortable. To test these systems, he monitors research subjects working in flip-flops—ankles, it turns out, are very sensitive to cold air blowing at them.
It may be a while before your office gets state-of-the-art foot-warming devices or in-floor cooling systems, but knowing how easily the temperatures around your feet affect your overall comfort, a high-tech solution isn’t strictly necessary to make cubicle life a little easier. Just change your shoes.
As I write this, my feet and ankles are going numb in the office tundra. Excuse me while I go change into some woolen work socks.
If you’d like to experience the public art of the Soviet Union, there’s no need to travel to Eastern Europe. In Seattle’s artsy Fremont neighborhood, there’s a monument to Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. Despite efforts by its owners to sell it off, it’s been in Washington since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc (first in Issaquah, before moving to Seattle in 1995).
Considering Lenin’s legacy of oppression and mass executions, the 16-foot, seven-ton bronze statue doesn’t sit well with all residents. It was originally brought to Seattle by Lewis Carpenter, a Washington resident who saved it from the scrapyards of Poprad, Slovakia. Arguing that it was a work of art that deserved to be preserved, he purchased it and brought it back to the U.S.
Carpenter died in 1994, not long after shipping the statue to Issaquah, Washington, where he planned to install it in front of a restaurant he was set to open. A year later, it made its way to Seattle, where it was displayed as a piece of public art, just one block south of the Rocket, another Cold War relic-turned-artwork. Carpenter’s family still owns the statue of Lenin, but would love to get it off their hands. There’s an entire Facebook page devoted to tearing it down, and it’s regularly vandalized by people who paint the statue’s hands blood red.
In 1995, the statue was put up for sale for $150,000, with the proceeds scheduled to benefit a local arts organization, but no buyer came forward. By 2015, the price had been raised to $250,000—or best offer, as the The Seattle Times reported. Whether it will actually ever be sold is another question.
“Who can say for sure if the community would accept a check for the sale of Lenin if offered? The sculpture has found a home in Fremont,” the Fremont Arts Council’s Barbara Luecke told mental_floss in an email. However, if anyone did actually want to pay the $250,000 that an art appraiser decided the statue was worth, “any proceeds from its sale would help with the maintenance of the various art projects around the neighborhood,” she says.
Until then, the statue serves as a handy guidepost for local directions (“keep going until you see Lenin” cannot be misunderstood), and occasionally gets new additions, like a tutu for the annual gay pride parade or a tinfoil-wrapped burrito to hold as an advertisement for the nearby Mexican restaurant.
When it comes to scientific research, creature comforts matter, even if the subjects are rodents. A 2016 review found that experiments on mice in warmer or colder temperatures can lead to significantly different results, impacting studies on cancer, obesity, and other diseases. And cold labs probably aren’t the only uncomfortable situations that are impacting basic research.
With this in mind, a team at Georgia Tech is engineering a better rat cage that can allow rodents to move more freely while attached to sensors and electronic devices.
“Anything that is abnormal or unnatural may bias the experiment, no matter what experiment in any field,” explains Maysam Ghovanloo, the creator of the EnerCage, a system designed to improve scientific data gathered from moving rats. “That includes grabbing the animal to attach or detach wires, change batteries or transferring it from one cage to another.”
The clear cage is wrapped in strips of copper foil that can power electronics and sensors that are implanted or attached to the rodents’ bodies, instead of loading the rodents with bulky batteries or attaching a bunch of wires. It’s also capable of sending researchers data about the rats’ behavior wirelessly, so that the rats’ behavior isn’t impacted by people handling them or hovering over them.
Resonating copper coils create a magnetic field within the cage, and another resonator is attached to the rat’s head. A Kinect motion-sensing camera installed above the cage takes 2D and 3D images in infrared and visible light of the rat’s location and posture, and there are four microphones to pick up any sounds. With algorithms that can identify the rats’ various postures and activities (sleeping, standing, sitting, grooming, eating, etc.), the system can monitor rat behavior without introducing a human element.
The EnerCage is still in the early phases, and the Georgia Tech team is currently working on developing a network of multiple cages to house and study several animals at the same time—since no studies use only one rat. They are also designing implants that would be able to deliver drugs to the animals inside the cage without human interference.
Martin Riese doesn’t have to worry about not drinking enough water. He’s a certified water sommelier, spending his days tasting different kinds of H2O. He attends international water-tasting competitions, and can tell you all about the composition of different tap waters—because no water is “pure,” per se, and every kind has different levels of dissolved solids.
“It’s not just about taste; it’s even about my eyes and my nose,” he says in this short movie from MEL Films. He takes at least two sips when he’s tasting, one “as a normal person would do it” and one swishing it around his mouth to add oxygen and really evaluate the taste. He’s looking for distinctive water, like one “literally insane” variety, which he says tastes fruity and tropical. Again, these aren’t flavored beverages, just water.
Still don’t get how anyone could make their life as an expert water drinker? Let Riese and his fellow water sommeliers explain the profession in the video above.
In 2013, Kano launched a Kickstarter to create a computer that someone with no technology experience—even a young kid—could build on their own. The resulting computer and screen kit let you build a computer and screen like you would a LEGO structure, with step-by-step instructions. Now, the company is adding more fun to the mix with a Kickstarter for three new hardware kits that let you build a speaker, a camera, or an LED pixel grid. Each kit allows you to program the hardware to respond to sound, motion, or other data inputs.
The camera kit contains a camera roughly on par with the one found in an iPhone 5S, a built-in microphone, and fun additions like a tripwire sensor to track movements and a flashing LED ring. The pixel kit is a grid of lights that you can program to flash in different patterns and in response to different inputs, like noise picked up by the microphone, or motion picked up by the tilt sensor or joystick. If you connect it to a network, you can stream tweets or weather information from online. The speaker kit has a microphone, an LED audio visualizer, and a gesture sensor.
Each kit comes with suggested projects like setting up your motion-sensing camera to take a picture every time someone opens the door to your room, turning your speaker into an alarm clock, or visualizing your music on the LED pixel grid.
They’re simple enough that it’s relatively easy to see how you might put them to work on projects in the physical world, unlike the more complicated coding kits like littleBits, which, frankly, can give you so much freedom that if you’ve never done any programming or engineering, it’s a little daunting to figure out where to start.
With the Kano kits, when you hook up your pixel kit to your computer, you drag-and-drop puzzle-shaped pieces of code with initial tutorials that show you exactly what to put and where. Once you complete the tutorial, you can begin to play around with the code to create different reactions, taking some of the deer-in-the-headlights confusion out of seeing a blank page or wondering “what am I supposed to do with this blank LED grid?”
The computer and screen kit, previously necessary to dig into any of Kano’s coding tutorials, costs a steep $284. While you can, technically, work with a screen or monitor you already have, the computer itself is still $150. The new kits present a slightly lower entry point into the company’s learning system, at just $99 each.
Even better, the Kano World community and tutorials are accessible to anyone, and you don’t need a Kano computer to play around with the platform. You can do it from your desktop, and simply watch the changes on a digital version of the kit in question. Or you can make digital drawings and games, like you would on the Kano computer.
Much like the Kano hardware kits are LEGO-like in their step-by-step process, letting you connect all the components yourself, all the coding tutorials feature enough guideposts that you don’t get frustrated, at least at first. The tutorial tells you exactly what to type, though you’re using real programming languages to do it.
I’ve told myself I would learn to do some basic coding countless times, and I almost inevitably give up halfway through the first or second tutorial. But the simple way the Kano Code platform walks you through the steps makes me want to try more lessons, even though I don’t have any of the kits myself. It’s not going to turn me into a coding whiz—especially since it’s hard to figure out what programming language you’re even working in by just looking at the tutorials—but it’s a frustration-free way to feel a little more comfortable manipulating the digital world.
The British Museum is cementing its reputation as a major destination for Pablo Picasso fans. The London-based museum, which already holds more than 550 works by the Spanish-born artist, recently purchased 19 rare prints the artist made between the 1940s and 1950s, according to BLOUIN ARTINFO.
The museum’s goal is to fully represent Picasso’s work as not just a painter, but a print maker, showing off his skills in etching, lithography, aquatint, and linocut. Of the newly acquired works, 16 are linocut, a variation on woodcut using linoleum, and three are aquatint, a method that uses an etched copper plate to create a print that looks much like a watercolor.
Six of the mint-condition prints feature Picasso’s muse, Françoise Gilot, with whom he had two children. One of those works features a pregnant Gilot with their toddler son playing at her feet, while another is a moody black portrait of her only a few months before she left him. Also in the collection of 1955 aquatints is a portrait of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s future wife. There are also portraits of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a friend of Picasso’s and a major dealer of 20th century French art, especially for Cubist painters.
The purchase of the new prints (worth millions, according to The Guardian) “now stands us among the most important public collections of Picasso in the world,” the museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, said in a press release.
The British Museum will display the new prints between January and March 2017. They’re also available to view by appointment in one of the museum’s study rooms.
Facebook doesn’t have a great reputation when it comes to keeping your information private. When the company bought the messaging app WhatsApp in 2014, the company promised there wouldn’t be any sharing of private info like phone numbers and profile data between the two; but this year, Facebook started sharing and storing those WhatsApp phone numbers anyway—prompting Germany to issue a regulatory challenge to the practice.
Even seemingly simple practices like allowing users to choose who they share certain profile updates with gets complicated when the company is constantly tweaking its settings, often in the service of making things more and more public. Facebook has, at times, used users’ location data to offer suggestions, though the company quickly said that that was a temporary test feature and no longer in use when the practice was reported in the media.
Furthermore, most of us don’t know what information we’re giving up when we agree to those long privacy agreements. Thanks to cookies, the social media giant can essentially follow you anywhere you go on the web, whether it’s on the Facebook site or not. So just what does Facebook know about you, and what is it telling other companies about you?
The watchdog reporters at ProPublica want to help you find the answers. They’ve developed a Chrome plugin that allows you to see what information Facebook has about you, from what the company thinks you’ll be interested in to which other companies have your contact information.
ProPublica’s reporters have spent a year investigating algorithms like those used by Facebook, and here’s how they describe the vast world of how the company creeps on you:
Facebook has a particularly comprehensive set of dossiers on its more than 2 billion members. Every time a Facebook member likes a post, tags a photo, updates their favorite movies in their profile, posts a comment about a politician, or changes their relationship status, Facebook logs it. When they browse the Web, Facebook collects information about pages they visit that contain Facebook sharing buttons. When they use Instagram or WhatsApp on their phone, which are both owned by Facebook, they contribute more data to Facebook’s dossier.
And in case that wasn’t enough, Facebook also buys data about its users’ mortgages, car ownership and shopping habits from some of the biggest commercial data brokers.
Facebook uses all this data to offer marketers a chance to target ads to increasingly specific groups of people. Indeed, we found Facebook offers advertisers more than 1,300 categories for ad targeting — everything from people whose property size is less than .26 acres to households with exactly seven credit cards.
Eek. Isn’t social media fun? According to my results, Facebook knows that Zipcar, The New York Times, and Zillow—whose app I’ve downloaded on my phone but never created an account with—all have my contact info, because those companies have apparently uploaded a contact list to Facebook with my information in it. It thinks that I will like Farmville. (Please, Facebook, don’t make me play Farmville!) I don’t tend to “like” that many pages, nor do I put information like where I work on my profile, but the company still knows a startling amount about me, and can predict the movies I want to watch, the music I like to listen to, and how often I travel.
You can download the Chrome plugin here, and explore the rest of the “black box” series at ProPublica.
