Science & TechnologyS


Sun

How language evolved from climate and terrain

Marissa Fessenden
Smithsonian Magazine
Sun, 15 Nov 2015 19:17 UTC
Try shouting words into the wind, what sounds make it through?

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© Gary Braasch/CORBISThe lush forests in Hawaii may have shaped its language.
Speech may come with its own version of terroir—like the rounded, vowel-rich Hawaiian language or the clipped, consonant-heavy speech of the Republic of Georgia. Much like terroir, these differences might have risen from variations in the landscape from where they originated, according to new research presented last week at the Acoustical Society of America Meeting.

The researchers examined over 600 languages for their structure, including usage of consonants, vowels, and syllables and correlated these factors with climate and landscape features like precipitation and ruggedness, Zoë Schlanger reports for Newsweek. They omitted data from languages where speakers have spread beyond a single region and thus complicate the picture—such as English, Manderin Chinese and Spanish.

Comment: Tone languages: How one syllable spoken in a different pitch can have seven different meanings

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2 + 2 = 4

Maternal mortality in U.S. higher than Canada

Tom Miles
Huffington Post
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 16:56 UTC
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© Kelvin Murray via Getty Images
Women are twice as likely to die from causes related to pregnancy or childbirth in the United States than in Canada, a new global survey of maternal mortality published by the United Nations and the World Bank showed on Thursday.

The United States was also one of only 13 countries to have worse rates of maternal mortality in 2015 than in 1990 - a group that also includes North Korea, Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

Comment:

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Music

Tone languages: How one syllable spoken in a different pitch can have seven different meanings

John McWhorter
The Atlantic
Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:35 UTC
Hmong music
© China Stringer Network / ReutersAn ethnic Hmong boy plays the lusheng to welcome the new year in Guizhou province, China.
People don't generally speak in a monotone. Even someone who couldn't carry a tune if it had a handle on it uses a different melody to ask a question than to make a statement, and in a sentence like "It was the first time I had even been there," says "been" on a higher pitch than the rest of the words.

Still, if someone speaks in a monotone in English, other English-speakers can easily understand. But in many languages, pitch is as important as consonants and vowels for distinguishing one word from another. In English, "pay" and "bay" are different because they have different starting sounds. But imagine if "pay" said on a high pitch meant "to give money," while "pay" said on a low pitch meant "a broad inlet of the sea where the land curves inward." That's what it feels like to speak what linguists call a tonal language. At least a billion and a half people worldwide do it their entire lives and think nothing of it.
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Satellite

Part of Pluto's heart was 'Born Yesterday'

Nola Taylor Redd
space.com
Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:00 UTC
Pluto craters
© NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research InstituteBy counting craters across Pluto, scientists determined that some regions of the dwarf planet are as young as 10 million years old while others are nearly as old as the 4.5-billion-year-old solar system.
Pluto has a surprisingly youthful heart — the smooth, round region on the dwarf planet's surface is no more than 10 million years old, a blink of an eye in the 4.5-billion-year lifetime of the solar system.

The large,western lobe of the "heart" on Pluto's surface is also known as Sputnik Planum, and it is strikingly free of craters. This suggests that geologic processes recently smoothed the region over. Researchers with NASA's New Horizons mission said this is surprising, because such processes require an internal heat source, which is often lost in small bodies like Pluto.

"It's a huge finding that small planets can be active on a massive scale, billions of years after their creation," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Colorado, said on Monday (Nov. 9) at the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in National Harbor, Maryland.
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Top Secret

Over 5500 secrecy orders imposed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Noel Brinkerhoff, Steve Straehley
AllGov
Fri, 13 Nov 2015 00:00 UTC
US Patent and Trademark Office seal
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but national security is given as the reason for keeping some inventions a secret.

Under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, the U.S. government can impose secrecy orders on patent applications if officials decide granting and publishing a patent would compromise national security.

Statistics collected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office showed there were 95 new secrecy orders imposed last year, according to the watchdog group Federation of American Scientists (FAS). The government also rescinded 36 secrecy orders previously in place.

All told, 5,579 invention secrecy orders were in effect at the end of fiscal year 2015, up from 5,520 the year before, Steven Aftergood of FAS reported. The total was the highest number for secrecy orders in more than a decade.

Comment: The Right to No. Some of these could be from defense contractors with military application, but who knows?

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Magnify

Brain scans may help predict recovery from coma


ScienceDaily
Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:00 UTC
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© igoraul / FotoliaBrain scans of people in a coma may help predict who will regain consciousness, according to a study. The study looked at connections between areas of the brain that play a role in regulating consciousness.
Brain scans of people in a coma may help predict who will regain consciousness, according to a study published in the November 11, 2015, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study looked at connections between areas of the brain that play a role in regulating consciousness.

For the study, 27 people in a coma with severe brain injuries were compared to 14 healthy people of the same ages. All of the participants had functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans taken of their brains. For those in a coma, the scans were conducted after any sedative drugs were out of their systems. Three months after their injuries, four of the people with coma had recovered consciousness. The others remained in a minimally conscious state or a vegetative state at three months.

All of the comatose people had significant disruption in the connections between brain areas and the posterior cingulate cortex. These changes were the same whether the brain injury was due to trauma or to lack of oxygen, such as from cardiac arrest.
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Satellite

NASA's Cassini finds monstrous ice cloud in south polar region of Saturn's moon Titan


ScienceDaily
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:00 UTC
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© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteThis 2012 close-up offers an early snapshot of the changes taking place at Titan's south pole. Cassini's camera spotted this impressive cloud hovering at an altitude of about 186 miles (300 kilometers). Cassini s thermal infrared instrument has now detected a massive ice cloud below it.
New observations made near the south pole of Titan by NASA's Cassini spacecraft add to the evidence that winter comes in like a lion on this moon of Saturn.

Scientists have detected a monstrous new cloud of frozen compounds in the moon's low- to mid-stratosphere -- a stable atmospheric region above the troposphere, or active weather layer.

Cassini's camera had already imaged an impressive cloud hovering over Titan's south pole at an altitude of about 186 miles (300 kilometers). However, that cloud, first seen in 2012, turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. A much more massive ice cloud system has now been found lower in the stratosphere, peaking at an altitude of about 124 miles (200 kilometers).

The new cloud was detected by Cassini's infrared instrument -- the Composite Infrared Spectrometer, or CIRS -- which obtains profiles of the atmosphere at invisible thermal wavelengths. The cloud has a low density, similar to Earth's fog but likely flat on top.
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Eye 1

Your smart TV is tracking your viewing data and sharing it with advertisers

Jake Anderson
Activist Post
Fri, 13 Nov 2015 21:50 UTC
spying eye
Since 9/11, American citizens have become relatively anesthetized to the growth of the surveillance state. However, the NSA's civil liberty transgressions sometimes obscure a reality that is becoming increasingly noxious: private industry is watching us just as voraciously as the government. Sometimes they use cameras, but it seems that more often, they are creating data-driven behavioral profiles of us based on everyday consumption in our own homes.

A troubling new report by ProPublica reveals that Vizio Smart TVs track what we view and report that information in a form that allows advertisers to then directly reach us on other devices. This is a bold new step past previous data collection by Samsung and LG Electronics.

The system is called "Smart Interactivity," and here's how it works: when you watch a Vizio Smart TV, the company assesses samples of what you're viewing to note the date, time, content, and channel of programming, as well as your IP address; Vizio partners with data brokers to link your IP address with your age, gender, income and interests; the new "enhanced data" is given to advertisers, who track all devices associated with that IP address.

Comment: See also: Smart TVs can spy on their owners

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Galaxy

New theory might tell us how galactic magnetic fields form

Carrie Poppy
Tech Times
Thu, 12 Nov 2015 18:12 UTC
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© NASA | FlickrPhysicists at Princeton may have the answer to how magnetic fields form around stars and galaxies ... and it's totally counter-intuitive. Pictured here, charged particles spin along the sun's magnetic field lines, giving us this rare view of its magnetic loops.
Physicists have figured out why we're all so attracted to stars.

For the first time ever, physicists from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (which they call PPPL, even though that's essentially just making a spitting noise) believe they have begun to understand how stars and galaxies form their magnetic fields.

We already know how planets get their magnetic fields. It starts with swirling plasma-like liquids at the planet's core. Those churning liquids conduct electricity and create an electric charge. However, until now, the origin of magnetic fields around stars and galaxies (which are by definition areas that share a large magnetic field) has been a mystery.

Comment:

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Satellite

'New Horizons' photo shows psychedelic colors of Pluto


RT
Fri, 13 Nov 2015 17:25 UTC
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© NASA
A newly-released photo of Pluto shows the dwarf planet like you've never seen it before - shining in a rainbow of vivid colors. Released by NASA, the 'Psychedelic Pluto' image is the latest in a series of photographs taken by the New Horizons spacecraft.

According to NASA, scientists created the image using a technique called principal component analysis, which highlights the "many subtle color differences between Pluto's distinct regions." The exaggerated colors make it easy for scientists to determine the varied texture and composition of Pluto's surface.

The original photo was taken by the Ralph/MVIC color camera on the New Horizons spacecraft during its historic flyby of the dwarf planet in mid-July. It was snapped from a range of 22,000 miles.

This is just the latest in a string of photos released from the flyby. Last month, an image was released showing the dwarf planet's crescent. Other photos released in October showed Pluto's tiniest moon, which measures just five miles across, and its largest moon, Charon.
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