CuttyP at the German language Wikipedia // CC-BY-SA-3.0
In Bremen, Germany, a 146-meter-high drop tower allows scientists to perform experiments in microgravity. As the name suggests, the tower is designed for experiments to literally drop from top to bottom, allowing for about 9.3 seconds of near-zero gravity.
There are drop towers around the world, but Fallturm Bremen offers the longest drop time of them all—in large part because they use a catapult system to get extra hang time on the way up. When the payload hits the bottom, a load of polystyrene breaks the fall.
In this video, Tom Scott visits the Bremen drop tower, explains the science, and shows us some footage from experiments inside. It’s fascinating technology, and every second counts. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it:
The next time you proudly sing along with the U.S. national anthem at a sporting event, take a moment to consider that it was once a song about drinking and sex. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is an example of a contrafactum—when new words are added to an old tune. Some of the most well-known songs in history, like these eight, were once vastly different than what we’ve come to know today.
1. “TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR” // “THE ALPHABET SONG” // “BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP”
Which song was the original? None of them. The tune is based on an old French folk song called “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman” (“Ah, Mother, If I Could Tell You”). It was already popular when a young Mozart composed Twelve Variations on “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman” in the 1780s.
The three popular children’s songs are basic versions of the tune. As for which of them came first, “Twinkle Twinkle” was originally a poem published in 1806, but doesn’t appear to have been set to “Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman” until 1838. “The Alphabet Song” (“A-B-C-D-E-F-G”) was published as “The Schoolmaster” in 1834, and “Baa Baa Black Sheep” existed under a different melody as far back as 1744. Of the three, It seems like the first to use the French tune was probably “The Alphabet Song,” but it’s hard to say for sure.
Though Francis Scott Key’s lyrics are unabashedly American, the tune they’re set to is anything but. Before it crossed the Atlantic, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a British song called “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Written for a London gentlemen’s music club called the Anacreontic Society around 1775, the song originally celebrated Anacreon, an ancient Greek poet who enjoyed love, music, and wine.
3. “MY COUNTRY, TIS OF THEE”
The U.S. national anthem isn’t the only patriotic song to have originated elsewhere: Though “My Country, Tis of Thee” has more regal origins, its back story is similar to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The song may have first appeared as “God Save Great George the King” sometime around 1740, and it’s still used today as “God Save the Queen/King”:
Baptist minister Samuel Francis Smith didn’t match American lyrics to it until 1831, while he was studying at Andover Theological Seminary. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the song also became the Danish national anthem, the Prussian national anthem, and the Liechtenstein national anthem, among others.
4. “HARK! THE HERALD ANGELS SING”
Before “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” was a Christmas carol celebrating the coming of the “newborn king,” it was a Felix Mendelssohn cantata that celebrated the coming of Johannes Gutenberg. Called “Festgesang zur Eröffnung der am ersten Tage der vierten Säcularfeier der Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst,” the piece was written to honor the 400th anniversary of the invention of the printing press. In 1855, an English musician named William Cummings made a 1739 composition entitled “Hymn for Christmas Day” fit the Mendelssohn masterpiece. Today, of course, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is much better known than the Gutenberg cantata.
5. “AULD LANG SYNE”
Many people hear “Auld Lang Syne” exactly once a year, when the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve. In Japan, the nostalgic song is much more commonplace—it’s used in many retail stores to notify customers that the store is closing soon. Instead of “Auld Lang Syne” (which is itself a mashup of an old folk song and a Robert Burns poem), the song is called “Hotaru no Hikari,” with lyrics about the various hardships suffered by a devoted student, including studying by the light of a firefly.
6. “WHAT CHILD IS THIS?”
This religious Christmas standard has come a long way since its 16th-century origins as an old English folk song. The original lyrics sang the praises of “Lady Greensleeves”—and there’s a theory that the term “greensleeves” is actually a reference to a prostitute.
Though rumors have long swirled that Henry VIII wrote the song for Anne Boleyn, they’re probably false—the song didn’t become popular until the reign of Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I.
7. “YANKEE DOODLE DANDY”
You’ve probably been singing “Yankee Doodle” since before you can recall—it’s one of the most common folk songs in the U.S., not to mention the state anthem of Connecticut. But before it was a Fourth of July staple, the British sang it to make fun of the poor, ragtag colonists. And before it was theirs, the Dutch used it as a harvest song, using nonsense lyrics like “Yanker dudel doodle down.”
8. “MY WAY”
Few songs are as synonymous with a performer as “My Way” is to Frank Sinatra—but it wasn’t actually “his.” It started out as a French song called “Comme d’habitude,” written in 1967 by composers Claude François and Jacques Revaux.
Singer, songwriter, and onetime teen idol Paul Anka heard it while visiting Paris, thought there was something to it, and bought the rights. He eventually rewrote the lyrics specifically for Frank Sinatra, and the rest is history. Unfortunately, it seems Ol’ Blue Eyes got a little burned out on his hit. “He always thought that song was self-serving and self-indulgent,” his daughter Tina once told the BBC.
An international coalition of researchers and public health officials have created a billion-dollar initiative to create and stockpile vaccines in the hope of preventing future epidemics. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) launched January 18 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
CEPI’s mission is simple: to prevent epidemics in the future by creating and amassing effective vaccines now. Vaccine development is a slow process, often requiring 10 or more years of research and testing before they’re ready and safe for human use.
But as we learned during the West African Ebola outbreak of 2013, disease epidemics don’t give us 10 years to catch up. Researchers were able to adapt existing experimental drugs to produce an effective vaccine in record time. Even that was too long to wait.
Jeremy Farrar is director of the Wellcome Trust, one of CEPI’s backing organizations. He remembers the 2013 outbreak with dismay. “We had to spend what was 9–12 months getting safety data for those vaccines, and that was 9–12 months where ultimately many people lost their lives,” he told Nature.
CEPI aims to eliminate those deadly months of lag time. Their research teams are first looking to create vaccines for the diseases most likely to cause massive outbreaks in the near future: Nipah virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Lassa fever.
Researchers say coalition members’ diverse backgrounds and expertise—from academia to business and government organizations—will be a huge asset to the project. “For too long, we have separated out the academic work from the next step of taking it into all that is actually required to make a vaccine,” Farrar told Nature.
The coalition has already secured $460 million USD in support from Norway, Germany, Japan, the Wellcome Trust, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and representatives say they expect to raise the rest by the end of 2017.
Changhong, a Chinese consumer electronics company, has released a new cell phone that can analyze the molecular properties of food, liquids, medicines, and more, CNET reports. The device is capable of reading body fat percentage, the quality of produce, and more.
Called the H2, the phone is fitted with a tiny, near-infrared spectrometer. Hold it over an object for a few moments, and the H2 will shine a light that penetrates its surface. The object’s molecules then bounce the light back to the phone, and the changed light is collected and analyzed in a database cloud.
The H2 is the first smartphone to harness this technology, which was developed by Israeli tech startup Consumer Physics. They originally created a small sensor called the SCiO, which worked in tandem with a subscription-based phone app. Consumer Physics joined forces with Changhong to make a phone with a small near-infrared spectrometer, pre-loaded with the requisite companion apps.
The technology isn’t 100 percent foolproof, The Verge points out. For example, you can’t use the H2 to scan just any object. Instead, the phone has separate apps for each type of item you scan, i.e. an app that can tell the sugar content in a piece of fruit, or apps that can tell you if your medicine is real, or how much body fat you have. Also, the H2’s measurements aren’t always consistent, or reliable.
The Changhong H2 was recently showcased at CES, an annual global consumer electronics and consumer technology tradeshow held in Las Vegas. The phone will soon be released in China, and it will arrive in the U.S. later this year. Its official price hasn’t been announced, but is expected to be set at nearly 3000 Chinese yuan ($430).
To paraphrase one famous and fish-tailed redhead: We’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty. We’ve got smileys and whatsits galore. You want pictures of trains? We’ve got like 20. But who cares? No big deal. We want more.
Little Mermaid (1989) parodies aside, the sentiment is very real: The redheads of the world are clamoring for emojis that look like them. As Emojipedia editor Jeremy Burge writes on his blog, the lack of redhead options has been a top complaint for the last few months. In response, Burge and the Emoji Subcommittee have drafted a proposal [PDF], which they’ll present next week during a meeting with the Unicode Technical Committee.
The proposal lays out two possible ways of rectifying this grievous problem. Unicode could create an emoji of a person with red hair. That emoji would work just like the blonde emoji, allowing users to customize for skin tone and gender.
It’s a simple solution that would be easy to implement, but there are some downsides. First, it keeps redheads as faces only and does not permit them to participate in any emoji activities like sports, cooking, or facepalming. Secondly, the subcommittee notes, “Creating a new human emoji for a single trait may not be desirable precedent.”
The second option is adding a pale skin/red hair option to skin color options, which would allow for redheaded facepalming but also incorrectly assumes that all redheads have pale skin.
Burge notes that the work to create the emoji might not be worth it, and that even an uproarious mob of redhead emoji users is still a pretty small group of people. He might be underestimating redheads’ natural gift for clamoring.
If the concept moves forward, we may be seeing redhead emojis by 2018.
In Australia, the dangers of snakes, spiders, and other venomous creatures may be far overblown in the popular imagination, as the BBC recently highlighted. The most dangerous animal in the country, in fact, is a more unassuming creature: the horse.
Research published in theInternal Medicine Journalexamined 42,000 hospital admissions for venomous stings and bites over the course of 13 years (2000–2013). Bees were the most dangerous, comprising 31 percent of hospital visits, while spider bites made up 30 percent and snake bites made up 15 percent.
And yet, as the BBC reports, none of the animals the researchers specifically studied was as deadly as the unassuming horse. Study author Ronelle Welton found during the research that horse-related injuries over the same period led to 74 deaths—more than all the animals in the study combined.
The study’s authors found that 64 people were killed by venomous stings or bites, the majority because of the subsequent allergic reaction. Despite the smaller number of snake bite hospitalizations, they were pretty deadly: Snake bites caused 27 of these deaths, the same as did bees and wasps. There were no deaths from spider bites.
Surprisingly, most of the fatalities occurred in cities, not while people were out in the wilderness. Most happened at home. It’s possible that people don’t seek medical care as urgently where healthcare options are plentiful, and can die very quickly from anaphylaxis. And people can develop bee allergies even if they didn’t develop a reaction to a previous sting. Only in 44 percent of fatalities from an allergic reaction related to an insect sting did the person get to the hospital before they died.
The lessons we can take from this are: Be extra careful around bees, and even more careful around the stable.
Accused criminals have used some wild excuses to explain away their crimes. Ethan Couch said he suffered from “affluenza.” Dan White blamed junk food (well, not exactly). But perhaps the most controversial defense to this day is dissociative identity disorder (DID)—previously known as multiple personality disorder.
There’s an enormous amount of suspicion surrounding dissociative identity disorder. Psychiatrists believe that people who suffer from this condition splinter their personality to deal with a trauma, often childhood abuse. By this definition, someone with DID could conceivably commit a horrific crime and not even know it—because one of their “multiples” or “alters” did it instead.
Skeptics believe criminals lie about having this disorder to avoid consequences, and it probably doesn’t help that characters in pulpy movies like Fight Club, Identity, and M. Night Shyamalan’s new film Split all have it. Still, some courts haveaccepted this plea, as three of these real-life cases show. But the other two prove that DID remains a highly contentious legal defense.
1. BILLY MILLIGAN
Most people trace the multiple personality defense back to Billy Milligan. Milligan was hauled into court in 1978 on several counts of rape, aggravated robbery, and kidnapping. His case soon garnered national attention when his lawyers pursued a plea of insanity, arguing that two different personalities had committed the crimes—not Milligan. This defense was highly unusual for the time, but it worked. Milligan was found not guilty, and the judge committed him to a psychiatric hospital. He escaped for four months in 1986, was released in 1991, and died from cancer in 2014.
Psychiatrists have suggested that Milligan had as many as 24 personalities, including a Yugoslavian munitions expert and a 3-year-old girl. Milligan’s life was also the subject of a nonfiction book, The Minds of Billy Milligan, which has long been in movie development. And if Leonardo DiCaprio has his way, he’ll be starring as Milligan.
2. JUANITA MAXWELL
Juanita Maxwell’s legal problems began in 1979, when she was charged with beating a 73-year-old woman to death. The murder occurred at the hotel where Maxwell worked as a maid and where the woman in question, Inez Kelly, lived. But Maxwell insisted that she hadn’t killed Kelly; her brasher personality, Wanda Weston, had. Whereas Maxwell came off as quiet and prim, Weston was chatty and bragged about smoking weed. She had no problem admitting on the witness stand that she had bludgeoned Kelly with a lamp, because the woman refused to return a pen. Maxwell’s transformation on the stand spooked onlookers, and the court found her not guilty by reason of insanity.
Maxwell was committed to a mental ward, with the full support of her husband, Sammy. Yet in 1988, soon after she was released, she landed in jail for robbing two banks in St. Petersburg, Florida. By that point, she had seven personalities, but Wanda was still pinned as the culprit of the crimes.
3. BILLY JOE HARRIS
When Billy Joe Harris was arrested in 2011, police called him “one of the most wanted men in Texas.” Others knew him as the “Twilight Rapist,” for his early morning assaults on elderly and disabled women. His DNA linked him to multiple attacks and burglaries spanning two years and several counties. Harris insisted he was not a serial rapist, though; rather, it was one of his alters.
According to Psychology Today, Dr. Colin Ross testified in court that he believed Harris had dissociative identity disorder, with reservations. He said he questioned Harris’s insanely high scores on the screening tests for DID—which were administered by the defense attorney, not Ross—and had caught Harris in lies about his personal life. Clearly, everyone else in the courtroom had suspicions, too. Some jurors suppressed laughter when Harris became “Bobby,” another one of his alleged personalities, on the stand. Worse still, he was recorded in a phone call to his girlfriend bragging about putting on a “good show” in court.
The judge tossed out Ross’s testimony and the jury convicted Harris. He received a life sentence, which he has tried to appeal—so far with no success.
4. DWAYNE WILSON
The case against Dwayne Wilson began on September 20, 2005, when his nephew, Paris, called the police. The boy explained that his uncle had stabbed him, his brother, his sister, and his mother in their New Jersey home. Paris was the only survivor.
When Wilson’s hearings commenced four years later, his lawyer argued that one of the defendant’s three personalities, “Kiko,” had actually committed the murders and that Wilson could not be held responsible for the crimes. But the judge rejected this argument and sentenced Wilson to 40 years in prison.
5. THOMAS HUSKEY
Thomas Huskey was known as “Zoo Man” among prostitutes in Tennessee, because he used to work in the elephant barn at Knoxville Zoo. But this whimsical nickname turned sinister when Huskey was charged with a string of murders. He confessed to killing four women, and was accused of raping and robbing two more. Police also recovered jewelry they believed Huskey had taken off his victims’ bodies as “souvenirs.” Huskey’s attorneys, however, insisted that their client had not confessed, kept trophies, or done anything wrong. The perpetrator was “Kyle,” his alternate personality.
The first jury to hear this case could not reach a consensus on the murder, and the prosecution eventually gave up those charges. But Huskey was convicted of the rapes he committed before the murders, and sentenced to 64 years in prison. The Knoxville News Sentinelcalled his case one of the most expensive in state history.
If your New Year’s resolution is to eat healthier, you should be taking control of your food—in the literal sense. A new study finds that if you serve yourself, you eat smaller portions of junk food and desserts, as the Science of Us and The Wall Street Journalreport. The study, led by USC marketing researcher Linda Hagen, found that the more people are physically involved in serving their food, the less interested they are in unhealthy snacks.
The researchers tested their hypothesis out over the course of five tests. In one, they invited students to help themselves to either dried fruit or Reese’s Pieces off a table. Sometimes, the table setup required students to scoop their own snack out of a bowl, while other times, the cups were already set out with 45-gram portions of the snack. The researchers later measured how much of the snacks in bowls or cups had been taken. In another test, people rated how healthy they felt after eating certain snacks, either pre-portioned or not.
Overall, the researchers found that participants were more inclined to choose large portions of unhealthy food if they didn’t portion the snacks out themselves. But there was no effect when people served themselves healthy food.
Eating choices affect how people see themselves, so when people choose to eat unhealthy foods, they feel bad about themselves. Previous research has found that eating in front of a mirror can help make people enjoy dessert less, since people have to confront their own choices in an immediate way. The researchers found that people felt less responsibility for their choices when served by someone else, and thus they felt better about eating unhealthy food.
However, slicing your own cake isn’t the only way to make healthier choices. Other studies have found the best way to increase self control is not to exercise greater willpower in the face of temptations but to take away those temptations altogether. So put away the pie. But if you must, don’t let anyone else slice it for you.
With virtual and augmented reality being introduced across television, sports, and video games, it’s only natural that the technology would be implemented for movies as well. As part of the marketing campaign for the upcoming sci-fi film Marjorie Prime, actor Jon Hamm will be recreated as a hologram at this month’s Sundance Film Festival. The hologram—a.k.a. #Holohamm—will debut at the after-party for the film’s festival premiere on January 23.
The hologram was created by 8i, a technology start-up that boasts, “Our proprietary technology transforms video from an array of cameras into a photo-realistic 3D hologram of a human that can be viewed from any angle, on any device for virtual, augmented or mixed reality.” The hologram is based on Hamm’s character from the movie, Walter Prime, who is also a hologram. Attendees will watch a demonstration of the hologram Hamm, who exists as a “VR experience and in mixed reality on a mobile device.”
“It is amazing to experience the future in the here and now,” Marjorie Prime producer Uri Singer said in a press release. “When we first started working on the movie, the script dictated that the holograms would be portrayed as a futuristic reality. Making an actual hologram, not only on film but one that can be experienced with VR/AR, attests to how present the future has become.”
Marjorie Prime is directed by Michael Almereyda and also stars Geena Davis, Lois Smith, and Tim Robbins. The movie is based on Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play of the same name. Here’s how Passage Pictures describes the film:
“’Marjorie Prime’ follows 86-year-old Marjorie (Lois Smith) who spends her final, ailing days with a computerized version of her deceased husband, Walter (Hamm). With the intent to recount their life together, Marjorie’s ‘Prime’ relies on the information from her and her kin to develop a more complex understanding of his history. As their interactions deepen, the family begins to develop ever diverging recounts of their lives, drawn into the chance to reconstruct the often painful past.”
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