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Hugh Pickens writes:

Nicholas St. Fleur writes at The Atlantic that in the sad final chapter to a career that traces back to racist remarks he made in 2007, James Watson, the famed molecular biologist and co-discoverer of DNA, is putting his Nobel Prize up for auction, the first Nobel laureate in history to do so. Watson, best known for his work deciphering the DNA double helix alongside Francis Crick in 1953, made an incendiary remark regarding the intelligence of black people that lost him the admiration of the scientific community in 2007 making him, in his own words, an "unperson". That year, The Sunday Times quoted Watson as saying that he felt “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” Watson added that although some think that all humans are born equally intelligent, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” Watson has a history of making racist and sexist declarations, according to Time. His insensitive off-the-cuff remarks include saying that sunlight and dark skin contribute to “Latin lover” libido, and that fat people lack ambition, which prevents them from being hired. At a science conference in 2012, Watson said of women in science, “I think having all these women around makes it more fun for the men but they’re probably less effective.” To many scientists his gravest offense was not crediting Rosalind Franklin with helping him deduce the structure of DNA.

Watson is selling his prized medallion because he has no income outside of academia, even though for years he had served on many corporate boards. The gold medal is expected to bring in between $2.5 million and $3.5 million when it goes to auction. Watson says that he will use the money to purchase art and make donations to institutions that have supported him, such as the University of Chicago and Watson says the auction will also offer him the chance to “re-enter public life.” “I’ve had a unique life that’s allowed me to do things. I was set back. It was stupid on my part,” says Watson “All you can do is nothing, except hope that people actually know what you are.”

From our non-denominational friends at NASA, by way of The Atlantic:

First up: "Mystic Mountain", a stellar nursery in the Carina Nebula.

tonyPick writes:

New Scientist has an article on research at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York on injecting human glial cells into mice, where the researchers:

This gave the mice a clear intelligence boost:

(Wikipedia has some background on glial cells).

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

After major shareholders and a U.K. government official publicly opposed BG Group's plan to award [new CEO Helge] Lund 12 million pounds ($19 million) in stock this year, the company announced Monday that it will stretch the award out over 5 years and attach stricter performance incentives to it. It now expects the award to be worth 4.7 million pounds, (story is severely truncated for non-subscribers) or about $7.4 million.

The change means Lund's pay will follow the company's existing rules for executive compensation schemes, which BG had sought to bend to help it woo Lund away from his previous post at a competitor firm. Abandoning its usual pay rules and accelerating Lund's stock award had brought criticism from multiple large investment advising companies including four of the largest institutional investors in the company. Vince Cable, the top minister for business issues in Prime Minister David Cameron's government, also publicly criticized the proposal as "excessive."

Additional reporting from The Daily Mail Online and The Guardian.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

O'Reilly and Associates just announced that they're offering a 50% discount on every ebook they sell (or 60% for orders of more than $100). Amazon is competing with a massive ebook sale of their own, offering "up to 80% off" on over 2,000 Kindle ebooks. But O'Reilly and Associates notes that their ebooks are DRM-free, and they're also offering discounts on their videos (which includes cloud syncing and a lifetime of free updates...)

Hugh Pickens writes:

AP reports that Montana lawmakers are drafting bills that would raise the daytime speed limit on Montana interstate highways from 75 to 80 and possibly as high as 85 mph. “I just think our roads are engineered well, and technology is such we can drive those roads safely,” says Art Wittich noting that Utah, Wyoming and Idaho have raised their speed limits above 75, and they haven't had any problems and drivers on German autobahns average about 84 mph. State Senator Scott Sales says he spent seven months working in the Bakken oil patch, driving back and forth to Bozeman regularly. “If I could drive 85 mph on the interstate, it would save an hour,” says Sales. “Eighty-five would be fine with me."

A few years ago Texas opened a 40 mile stretch on part of a toll road called the Pickle Parkway between Austin and San Antonio. The tolled bypass was supposed to help relieve the bottleneck around Austin but the highway was built so far to the east that practically nobody used it. In desperation, the state raised the toll road speed limit to 85 mph, the fastest in the nation. "The idea was that drivers could drop the top, drop the hammer, crank the music and fly right past Austin," says Wade Goodyn. "It's a beautiful, wide-open highway — but it's empty, and the builders are nearly bankrupt."

Afir writes:

From https://github.com/abarisain/dmix/issues/656

It is with great disappointment that I'm using this space to announce that Google made the harsh decision to remove MPDroid[*] from the Play Store. If they remove it, as they told me they will, 1.07 will be the last update you will get automatically from the Play Store. For information, Google removed MPDroid for 'Copyright infringement' without telling us what we did wrong, and we lost the appeal without being able to speak to a human.

[*] Ed's note/update: MPDroid is, apparently, an application that runs on Android and serves as an interface to Music Player Daemon:

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol.

lhsi writes:

Researchers have found that athletes perform better when they are displayed positive subliminal messages.

"gewg_" writes:

I found this a while back. It seems to show on one axis the Pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps ideology vs The Good Samaritan notion and the other axis looks to be the I-know-what's-best-for-you meme vs the It's-your-life,-live-it thing.
Maybe you too will find the relative positions of the various sects interesting.
The Buddhists and Atheists are close together.
The Muslims, Hindus, and black Baptists aren't far apart.
The Mormons and Southern Baptists are clustered.
The Catholics barely budge from dead center.

The Center for American Progress asks:

Does where you go to church (or temple, or mosque, or service, etc.) actually dictate your political views? A new chart, compiled by Tobin Grant of the Religion New Service [...] takes a stab at answering this question by visually illustrating the general political beliefs of religious people on two policy questions. In it, an individual's income bracket--and political opinions generally reflective of one's economic situation--looks to coincide with what "kind" of church he/she attends. Except for when it doesn't.

As Grant explains: "This new graph maps the ideologies of 44 different religious groups using data comes from [Pew Research's 2008] Religious Landscape Survey. This survey included 32,000 respondents. It asked very specific questions on religion that allow us to find out the precise denomination, church, or religion of each person."

In other words, the dimensions of each color-coded circle reflect the relative size of the religious group it represents, and a circle's position on the graph illustrates how the faithful feel about the government's involvement in both the economy (bigger government with more services vs. smaller government with less services) and morality (greater protection of morality vs. less protection of morality).

Hugh Pickens writes:

Michael Tarm reports that a former high school quarterback has filed a lawsuit against the Illinois High School Association saying it didn't do enough to protect him from concussions when he played and still doesn't do enough to protect current players. This is the first instance in which legal action has been taken for former high school players as a whole against a group responsible for prep sports in a state. Such litigation could snowball, as similar suits targeting associations in other states are planned. "In Illinois high school football, responsibility — and, ultimately, fault — for the historically poor management of concussions begins with the IHSA," the lawsuit states. It calls high school concussions "an epidemic" and says the "most important battle being waged on high school football fields ... is the battle for the health and lives of" young players. The lawsuit calls on the Bloomington-based IHSA to tighten its head-injury protocols. It doesn't seek damages. "This is not a threat or attack on football," says attorney Joseph Siprut, who reached a $75 million settlement in a similar lawsuit against the NCAA in 2011. "Football is in danger in Illinois and other states — especially at the high school level — because of how dangerous it is. If football does not change internally, it will die. The talent well will dry up as parents keep kids out of the sport— and that's how a sport dies."

Previous research has shown that far from innocuous, invisible injuries, concussions confer tremendous brain damage. Individuals with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) may show symptoms of dementia, such as memory loss, aggression, confusion and depression, which generally appear years or many decades after the trauma. "The idea that you can whack your head hundreds of times in your life and knock yourself out and get up and be fine is gone," says Chris Nowinski. "We know we can't do that anymore. This causes long-term damage."

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

From the ever politically neutral UC Berkeley (via phys.org) comes this fun little article.

The study highlights a paradoxical consequence of the political correctness (PC) norm. While PC behavior is generally thought to threaten the free expression of ideas, Professor Jennifer Chatman of the Haas School's Management of Organizations Group and her co-authors found that positioning such PC norms as the office standard provides a layer of safety in the workplace that fosters creativity.

"Creativity is essential to organizational innovation and growth. But our research departs from the prevailing theory of group creativity by showing that creativity in mixed-sex groups emerges, not by removing behavioral constraints, but by imposing them. Setting a norm that both clarifies expectations for appropriate behavior and makes salient the social sanctions that result from using sexist language unleashes creative expression by countering the uncertainty that arises in mixed-sex work groups," says Chatman.

Personally, I'd like to see the exact same study done with "political correctness" swapped out with simply "treating others with dignity and respect". This one smells entirely too strongly of an agenda to me.

hubie writes:

One of the great mysteries of planetary science is whether Mars has harbored life in the past, and if so, what happened to it. The possibility of an advanced civilization on Mars has captured the public interest off and on for over a hundred years. Usually such speculation remains within the confines of magazine serials, radio programs, television sitcoms, or the movies. However, the thought of an advanced civilization has caught the interest of at least one scientist, the well-known astronomer Percival Lowell, he of the eponymous observatory. Lowell spent years studying and observing Mars and was convinced there existed a network of canals designed by Martians to bring water from the polar regions down to the arid regions of the planet.

Last month, at the annual meeting of the Prairie Section of the American Physical Society, a scientific take on Martian civilizations was again addressed. Plasma physicist John Brandenburg presented a paper (Evidence of Massive Thermonuclear Explosions in Mars Past, The Cydonian Hypothesis, and Fermi's Paradox) that lays out the evidence that advanced civilizations existed on at least two regions of Mars, and that they were wiped out by thermonuclear explosions in a form of a Martian Mutual Assured Destruction. He makes his case by noting the existence of certain relatively rare isotopes that are typically only seen in abundance on Earth following nuclear detonations. The 51 page paper, which will be published by The Journal of Cosmology, also presents considerable evidence supporting claims of the existence of advanced civilizations, including the well-known Face.

"gewg_" writes:

Tom's Guide reports

A volunteer group of engineers at Samsung has devised an effective and affordable method for disabled people to use computers. The Eyecan+ is a portable unit that attaches to the bottom of a monitor and detects your eye movements to launch tasks onscreen.

With the Eyecan+, those unable to move their limbs will be able to navigate their computers with their eyes via 18 built-in commands, including copy, paste, select all, zoom in, scroll, and drag and drop.

[...]Custom commands can also be created out of keyboard shortcuts [...] An initial calibration is required on setup to help Eyecan+ recognize an individual's eye movements, and the user has to be situated between 23.6 to 27.5 inches from the monitor.

This isn't Samsung's first eye-controlled mouse. The company launched its first Eyecan in March 2012, and the Eyecan+ represents an upgrade in the device's sensitivity and user experience.

The Korean electronics giant will be making a limited quantity of the Eyecan+ and donating them to charity organizations and does not intend to sell them commercially. However, it will make the technology and design of the device open source, so that those who want to make it for themselves can do so. Samsung also said the information will be "made accessible to companies and organizations that wish to commercialize the eye mouse." According to a report by The Verge, each unit will cost about $500 to produce.

tonyPick writes:

Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy blog has an article on the short film Wanderers, by Erik Wernquist.

Seriously, stop whatever you’re doing and WATCH THIS VIDEO. And yes, you very much want to make it full screen:
...
But take a moment and let this sink in: Nearly every location depicted in this video is real. These aren’t just fanciful places made up in the head of a special effect artist; those are worlds in our solar system that actually exist. And many were based on images taken through telescopes, or probes that have physically visited these distant locales.
...
Nothing in there is impossible; no faster than light travel, no wormholes. Even the space elevator shown towering over Mars and the huge cylindrical rotating colony in space (did you notice the Red Sea in it?) are problems in engineering, not physics. We can build them.

Erik Wernquist has a page on the film, with stills and information on the data used to construct the scenes on the screen. There's also a write up at io9, with further commentary on the images.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Straight from the horse's (rather dry) mouth, the SCOTUS is hearing arguments today on Elonis v. United States.

Issue: (1) Whether, consistent with the First Amendment and Virginia v. Black , conviction of threatening another person under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) requires proof of the defendant's subjective intent to threaten, as required by the Ninth Circuit and the supreme courts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont; or whether it is enough to show that a “reasonable person” would regard the statement as threatening, as held by other federal courts of appeals and state courts of last resort; and (2) whether, as a matter of statutory interpretation, conviction of threatening another person under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) requires proof of the defendant's subjective intent to threaten.

This would be the case where a Pennsylvania man posted violent rap lyrics to Facebook and was subsequently prosecuted for them being construed as an actual threat. A verdict isn't expected before June though, so until then watch what you quote online.