Forget that trademark zombie shuffle; we’re all in serious trouble now that they’ve jumped on (or over) the parkour bandwagon.
Feel free to start flipping out right about…now.
Full story at YouTube via Geekosystem.
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Those who struggle with fertility issues are all too familiar with the emotional highs and lows that come with trying every trick in the book, yet an article recently published in Reproductive BioMedicine Online reports that a new technique using timelapse images of the developing embryos could help determine which were most likely to result in the high spirits lasting right through to a happy ending (or beginning, in this case).
With this new technique, the authors were able to develop a way to successfully identify which embryos have a high risk of abnormal chromosomes, called “aneuploidy”. When embryos have this chromosome abnormality there is a much lower chance of implantation resulting in a healthy live birth…
…The researchers observed that the time-lapse technique resulted in a 61 percent successful live birth rate among the couples [in the study] compared to only 39 percent for all embryos (at any risk level).
Here’s to hoping for the best.
Full story at Medical News Today.
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We always thought the bartender was half the bar experience, but it looks like they’d better watch their backs now that the Makr Shakr has made its debut.
These three industrial robots are the brainchild of MIT SENSEable City Laboratory and Italian architecture studio Carlo Ratti Associati and allow patrons to order customized cocktails via app, yet we doubt most dive bars have the capacity to house these five to six metric ton beasts.
Plus, they’d never even pretend to listen to our sob stories.
Full story at Gizmodo via Laughing Squid.
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Not a day seems to pass when online privacy issues make headlines, so the Electronic Frontier Foundation decided to read the fine print for you and evaluate the Internet’s heavy hitters on how seriously they take keeping your personal information private.
Each company was evaluated on six criteria that are explained in more depth at The Consumerist or you can read the original report here.
Full story at The Consumerist.
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This week was one of those week’s that people had a lot of content lifted. Erika Napoletano had two instances this week that were serious and she talks about one of them on this article If You’re Going to Rip Me Off, at Least Be Creative About it. The nutshell version is that Erika has a page that she set up for consulting work called Buy Me Coffee and someone lifted the content word for work and changed very little of it. AND to top if off, another person copied the same content calling it Buy Me a Chai Latte but all the text was the same including listing Erika’s work experience. They took Erika’s intellectual property and tried to use it to sell their consulting services. Both of them. What is wrong with people?
ACCORDING TO THE MERRIAM-WEBSTER ONLINE DICTIONARY, TO “PLAGIARIZE” MEANS
Basic rules:
You can’t repost content from someone else’s blog without their permission. Period.
It’s unethical to take other’s people’s writing and pass it off as yours. Period. This includes tweets and posts that people write. Cause it’s, ya know, writing.
Hit the SHARE button, don’t cut and paste. If you do repost, mention the person who shared/created the post.
If you read something and use the ideas for your content, cite your sources. Period.
Be a good social media citizen and CITE your sources. This makes you a better person and more respected. Getting caught lifting someone else’s content will trash your reputation. Very quickly.
Full article on Peg Fitzpatrick
Photo credit Crimson Devices
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A new electronic stethoscope designed for NASA could deliver accurate heart and body sounds to medics assessing astronaut health in a noisy spacecraft.
Space itself is silent; the lack of air prevents sound transmission. But inside the average spacecraft, with its whirring fans, humming computers, and buzzing instruments, it’s about as raucous as a party filled with laughing, talking people.
The prototype of a stethoscope designed for use in the noisy environment of a spacecraft replaces familiar ear buds of a traditional stethoscope with noise canceling headphones. Acoustic tubing gives way to wire and the rubber-covered chest piece includes a suction cup to keep it motionless on the skin.
“Imagine trying to get a clear stethoscope signal in an environment like that, where the ambient noise contaminates the faint heart signal. That is the problem we set out to solve,” says Elyse Edwards, an engineering student at Johns Hopkins University who teamed up on the project with fellow seniors Noah Dennis and Shin Shin Cheng.
Full story at Futurity.
Photo credit: Will Kirk
From the Wall Street Journal:
Here are five ways you can help:
1) Donate to the Red Cross:
2) Volunteer or Donate to the Salvation Army:
3) Donate to The United Way of Central Oklahoma:
4) Donate to Operation USA:
5) Donate to Oklahoma Baptist Disaster Relief:
Please see more, and explanations of the work these charities are doing, at: Wall Street Journal.
Photo credit: Wiki Commons Image: Katrina search and rescue operation
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Oklahoma’s in a state of crisis after yesterday’s EF-4 tornado which, despite the devastation caused and surprisingly, isn’t even the strongest on the Fujita scale. And this EF-4 twister destroyed a town of 55,000 people, the worst tornado in American history, says the New Yorker Magazine.
(Note: You may recall that tornadoes used to be measured by a scale beginning with the letter “F” – see below for the new way of calculating tornadoes)
The tornado that levelled much of Moore, Oklahoma, a town of fifty-five thousand south of Oklahoma City, on Monday afternoon was one of the worst in American history. At this writing, twenty-four people have been counted among the dead, including nine children. The tornado is estimated to have been between one and two miles in diameter. It stayed on the ground for at least forty minutes and travelled an estimated thirteen miles. But those numbers are not much more than guesses; ultimately, the scariest thing about tornadoes is how little we know about them.
This is how the American Meteorological Society defines a tornado:
…a tornado is “a violently rotating column of air, pendant from a cumuliform cloud or underneath a cumuliform cloud, and often (but not always) visible as a funnel cloud.”
And this from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (N.O.A.A.):
most tornadoes are born from large, rotating thunderstorms called “supercells,” which combine four specific atmospheric factors: moisture, instability, lift, and wind shear. But no one knows exactly what quantity or combination of those factors results in a twister. N.O.A.A.’s Storm Prediction Center reports that many different initial weather conditions can lead to tornadoes, but—most perplexing of all—those same conditions frequently produce no tornadoes whatsoever. The only way to know for sure that a given weather condition will produce a tornado is if one actually appears. (In fact, tornado forecasting was once so uncertain that meteorologists at the U.S. Weather Bureau were discouraged from issuing tornado forecasts until 1950.)
Tornados typically last from a few seconds to a few minutes.
The current scale for measuring tornadoes was devised by Dr. T. Ted Fujita, a Japanese-born American meteorologist who specialized in severe storms. He looked at previous parameters and decided that they were not illustrative enough of the various strengths of these killer storms and proposed a new scale that went all the way to F12 (which, according to the New Yorker article, is the equivalent of Mach 1 winds – seen on Neptune but never on earth).
But, continues the article, there were three problems with Fujita’s proposed scale:
- it was based on observation, not measurement—tornadoes are so destructive that normal weather instruments can’t stand up to them, and they’re so unpredictable that it is difficult to deploy hardened instruments inside them.
- it didn’t take into account various forms of building construction: obviously, a big box store will stand up to a tornado better than a mobile home.
- [it] didn’t account for time: a brief, fast-moving storm with high winds might actually do less damage than a long-lasting storm with slower winds.
So now we have an Enhanced Fujita Scale, or EF measurement which takes in to account damage done. That’s how they put Monday’s storm at an EF-4 and not the maximum EF-5:
The severe damage done to buildings like the Plaza Towers Elementary School and Briarwood Elementary School, as well as the near total destruction of many single-family houses, enables scientists to categorize Monday’s tornado as an E.F.4—a violent, intense storm that nevertheless is not as bad as the most extreme kind of tornado, an E.F.5. The Enhanced Fujita scale came into use in 2007, and is now the official way to judge the impact of a tornado—at least, of the physical damage it causes.
For more, please see: New Yorker.
Photo credit: Tornado – WikiCommons
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Workplace bullying is pervasive. A new study indicates that as many as half of all employees in the US have witnessed bullying at work, and 35 percent have been the target of bullying.
“Many bullies can be seen as charming and friendly, but they are highly destructive and can manipulate others into providing them with the resources they need to get ahead,” says the study’s co-author, Darren Treadway, associate professor of organization and human resources at the University at Buffalo School of Management.They use those skills to strategically abuse their coworkers, yet still receive positive evaluations from their supervisors, according to a recent study that is one of the first attempts to measure the relationship between being a bully and job performance.
It offers an initial explanation of why bullies thrive in the workplace despite organizational attempts to sanction bullying behaviors.
Full story at Futurity.
Photo credit: Chelsea/Flickr
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