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Brayden King and Jerry Kim write in the NYT that a team studying more than 700,000 pitches into the strike-zone during major league baseball games found that umpires frequently made errors behind the plate - about 14 percent of non-swinging pitches were called erroneously. Using pitch-location data compiled by high-speed cameras , the team found that many of those errors occurred in fairly predictable ways. For example, umpires tend to favor the home team by expanding the strike zone, calling a strike when the pitch was actually a ball 13.3 percent of the time for home team pitchers versus 12.7 percent of the time for visitors. Other errors were more surprising. For example, analysis suggests that umpires were 13 percent more likely to miss an actual strike in the bottom of the ninth inning of a tie game than in the top of the first inning, on the first pitch.

However the research team also observed that there are other errors that are not deliberate that may reflect an unconscious and biased decision-making process. In general umpires tend to make errors in ways that favor players who have established themselves at the top of the game's status hierarchy (PDF). For example, an umpire was about 16 percent more likely to erroneously call a pitch outside the zone a strike for a five-time All-Star than for a pitcher who had never appeared in an All-Star Game and an umpire was about 9 percent less likely to mistakenly call a real strike a ball for a five-time All-Star. Finally pitchers with a track record of not walking batters - like Greg Maddux - were much more likely to benefit from their All-Star status than similarly decorated but "wilder" pitchers like Randy Johnson.

"This season Major League Baseball is allowing its officiating crews to use instant replay to review certain critical calls, including home runs, force plays and foul balls. But the calling of the strike zone - determining whether a pitch that is not swung at is a ball or a strike - will still be left completely to the discretion of the officials," conclude the authors. "Technologically, Major League Baseball is in a position, thanks to its high-speed camera system, to enforce a completely accurate, uniform strike zone. The question is whether we, as fans, want our games to be fair and just, or whether we are compelled to watch the game because it mimics the real world, warts and all."

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Costco will dump almost one million jars of peanut butter into a New Mexico landfill and bulldoze over them after retailer Costco refused to take shipment of the peanut butter and declined requests to let it be donated to food banks or repackaged or sold to brokers who provide food to institutions like prisons. The peanut butter comes from a bankrupt peanut-processing plant that was at the heart of a salmonella outbreak in 2012 and although "all parties agreed there's nothing wrong with the peanut butter from a health and safety issue," court records show that on a 19 March conference call Costco said "it would not agree to any disposition ... other than destruction."

Despite the peanut butter being safe, Curry County landfill employee Tim Stacy says that no one will be able to consume the peanut butter once it's dumped because it was immediately rolled over with a bulldozer, destroying the supply. Stacy added more trash will then be dumped on top of the pile. Sonya Warwick, spokeswoman for New Mexico's largest food bank, declined to comment directly on the situation, but she noted that rescued food accounted for 74% of what Roadrunner Food Bank distributed across New Mexico last year. "Access to rescued food allows us to provide a more well-rounded and balanced meal to New Mexicans experiencing hunger." No word yet on where anyone was going to find a million jars of jelly.

Mark Prigg reports on a smartphone app for recovering alcoholics that sounds an alert when they get too close to their favorite bars. The app, nicknamed A-CHESS for the Center for Health Enhancement Systems Studies, has been deemed a success in initial trials as adults who got free sober smartphones reported fewer drinking days and more overall abstinence than those who got the usual follow-up support. The app contains a range of support facilities, including GPS that triggers when the person gets near a favorite bar. If it seems that they are contemplating entering (such as if they stay near the area), the app will play a pre-recorded confessional video of the patient recounting their experience with alcoholism or a recording of one of their children pleading with them not to drink. The app also includes a panic button that can be programmed to notify peers who are nearest to the patient when the button is pushed. "It does seem a little intrusive, but for people who are really battling with alcoholism, they need a lot of this type of monitoring and ongoing support," says Dr. Scott Krakower. "They do well in controlled settings, but when they leave the center and go back into their environment, they are at risk for relapse."

A clinical trial observed 350 participants recently released from rehabilitation centers, with 52 percent using A-CHESS remaining alcohol-free for the following year. Of those participants who received only traditional support methods, only 40 percent remained alcohol-free. Users of A-CHESS also experienced half the risky drinking days of those who did not. A company is being formed to commercialize the app and A-CHESS could soon become available to the public through Android and Apple stores. Dr. Gail Basch says proven methods for helping prevent relapse include patient monitoring and support from family and peers. "A stand-alone mobile app may not be the answer, but one can see how it could fit in nicely. A real-time tool, as well as reminders throughout the day, could be very helpful for a recovering brain."

Nate Swammer writes at Slashgear that with Facebook's purchase of Oculus for a cool $2 billion, the fervor surrounding virtual reality headwear quickly turned to disdain while betrayal, confusion, and anger became the response of contributors who gave Oculus $2.4 million through its Kickstarter campaign. But looking at the factors dispassionately, the Facebook acquisition may turn out much better than anticipated for users. Oculus wasn't flush, and there were strong indications they had been beaten at their own game. In their official announcement of the Facebook deal, gaming was barely a blip on the radar. It wasn't until the very end that gaming was even mentioned, with the bulk of the post discussing "culture" and driving virtual reality forward. There was little to indicate any big titles were coming for Oculus, and the most notable in Minecraft has pulled support altogether. The headwear also famously suffered from a supply chain issue not long ago, which actually stopped it dead in its tracks.

The fact is, Oculus needed help. Not technical advisory, but someone who could be their Sony, more or less. John Carmack says he has "a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale." Perhaps Facebook isn't the most popular choice, but they are the partner Oculus chose for their future says Swammer. "Like Google purchasing Android in 2005, it all seems so strange right now -- but we see how that turned out. If VR really is the next frontier, Facebook just staked their claim to a big slab of land in the heart of some virtual country they'll likely let us see someday - via Oculus."

Urine is sterile, and chlorine is sterilizing. At least that's the justification swimmer offer themselves, to counter their shame and what's more, decorated Olympic swimmers Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte admit they do it too. "It's kind of a normal thing to do with swimmers," says Phelps. "You know, when we're in the water for two hours we don't really get out, you know, to pee."

It turns out that it's a pretty bad idea, for more reasons than just the ick factor as Julie Beck writes that a new study published in the American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science & Technology, has looked at the chemistry of what happens when urine meets chlorine, and it's not pretty. When researchers mixed uric acid, found in both urine and sweat, with chlorine, they found that both trichloramine and cyanogen chloride form within an hour. "We know that there are associations between some of these chemicals and adverse human health outcomes, so we're motivated to understand the chemistry behind their formation and decay," says Ernest Blatchley III.

Exposure to trichloramine has been linked to respiratory problems (PDF), and cyanogen chloride can adversely affect the lungs, central nervous system, and cardiovascular system. Another issue is if a lot of people are peeing in the pool, there's the potential for a lot of cyanogen chloride to form, depleting the chlorine in the pool. While the cyanogen chloride would normally decay quickly, less chlorine means it might stick around longer, and that could be a real problem. All of this is to say that peeing in the pool is not harmless, despite Phelps' and Lochte's claims that it's normal and everybody does it. "There's a lot of people in the swimming community who look up to these people and listen to what they have to say," says Blatchley "[Phelps and Lochte] are not chemists and shouldn't be making statements that are that false."

The Washington Post reports that a group of evolutionary biologists looked at the science of bump and grind, and say they have figured out exactly which dance movements catch a woman's eye. Researchers set up the experiment as follows: they recruited 30 men to dance to a core drum beat for 30 seconds. The dancers were given no specific instructions on how to dance beforehand, and their movements were recorded via a sophisticated motion-capture system. Each dancer's 30-second routine was then used to animate a "featureless, gender-neutral" computer-generated avatar. Researchers then asked 37 women to view each of the dancing avatars and rate their performance on a seven-point scale. The results: Women rated dancers higher when they showed larger and more variable movements of the head, neck and torso (PDF). Speed of leg movements mattered too, particularly bending and twisting of the right knee. Going beyond the dance floor, these findings could demonstrate that mens' dance moves could carry "honest signals of traits such as health, �tness, genetic quality and developmental history." No word yet on whether similar findings hold true for mens' assessments of womens' dancing ability as an indication of their genetic quality and fitness.

Jamal Andress writes that creationists are grumbling about Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey" because the show doesn't include creationist theories about the universe's origins. "Do they ever give a creationist any time?" says creationist Danny Falkner who appeared on "The Janet Mefford Show" to complain. "I was struck in the first episode where he talked about science and how, you know, all ideas are discussed, you know, everything is up for discussion - it's all on the table - and I thought to myself, 'No, consideration of special creation is definitely not open for discussion, it would seem." Tyson recently said science reporting should not be balanced with nonscientific claims, so it seems unlikely he would offer creationism a platform for their views on his own show. "There was a time when science and religion kind of co-existed under the same roof," says Tyson. "I find it odd that we live in a time where people who are strongly religious want to make everyone else the same kind of religious way they are, and break down the door of the science classroom to put their religious philosophies in there." The good thing about science says Tyson is that it's true whether you believe in it or not.

Jeremy Rifkin writes in the NYT that the inherent dynamism of competitive markets is bringing down costs so far that many goods and services are becoming nearly free, abundant, and no longer subject to market forces and while economists have always welcomed a reduction in marginal cost, they never anticipated the possibility of a technological revolution that might bring those costs to near zero. The first inkling of this paradox at the heart of capitalism came in 1999 when Napster enabled millions of people to share music without paying the producers and artists, wreaking havoc on the music industry. Similar phenomena went on to severely disrupt the newspaper and book publishing industries. The huge reduction in marginal cost is now beginning to reshape energy, manufacturing and education. "Although the fixed costs of solar and wind technology are somewhat pricey, the cost of capturing each unit of [renewable] energy beyond that is low (PDF)," says Rifkin. As for manufacturing "thousands of hobbyists are already making their own products using 3-D printers, open-source software and recycled plastic as feedstock, at near zero marginal cost" and more than six million students are enrolled in "free massive open online courses, the content of which is distributed at near zero marginal cost."

But nowhere is the zero marginal cost phenomenon having more impact than the labor market, where workerless factories and offices, virtual retailing and automated logistics and transport networks are becoming more prevalent. What this means according to Rifkin is that new employment opportunities will lie in the collaborative commons in fields that tend to be nonprofit and strengthen social infrastructure like health care, aiding the poor, environmental restoration, child care, care for the elderly, and the promotion of the arts and recreation. "As for the capitalist system, it is likely to remain with us far into the future, albeit in a more streamlined role, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to thrive as a powerful niche player in the coming era. We are, however, entering a world partly beyond markets, where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent, collaborative, global commons."

Measles is spreading in upper Manhattan and the Bronx, according to public health authorities in New York as about 16 cases have turned up, including two that involved contagion in doctors' offices. Outbreaks have also been reported in the Boston area, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Now the LA Times reports that the first signs of a backlash against anti-vaccination falsehoods emerged last week, when that noted scientific authority and spokesmodel Jenny McCarthy, who has been spreading anti-vaccination drivel for years, got wasted by the Internet community when she left herself open to a reaction. On Thursday, McCarthy asked a question of her fans on Twitter to see what they'd say. What she got was a dose of the reality she helped spawn. The question: "What is the most important personality trait you look for in a mate? Reply using #JennyAsks" Just when you think that Internet commentary is nothing more than a wretched hive of scum and villainy, a light shines through so strongly it can help restore your optimism about people says Phil Plait as McCarthy received hundreds of replies including "They vaccinate their kids," "Someone who vaccinates, b/c I'd want our kids to survive," "Someone who respects that science isn't on some secret malicious crusade to screw us over and that vaccinations save lives," "What qualities do I look for in a mate? Science literacy and critical thinking skills," and "Ideal mate accepts scientific consensus & considers the elderly, infants & immune compromised b4 spreading baseless hysteria." McCarthy responded with a tweet saying "Thank you to all the haters who tweet my name. You make my Q SCORE higher and higher. It's because of you I continue to work. Thank you! : )" However, she did not address the substance of the tweets directed at her -- that her advocacy on behalf of the anti-vaccine movement has contributed to a dramatic rise in vaccine-preventable illnesses.

In 1973, when a solar panel and shield were torn from the Skylab Space Station, leaving the orbiting Skylab exposed to a dangerous level of solar heat, Jack A. Kinzler, chief of the all-purpose machine and tool shop at NASA's Johnson Space Center, turned to one of mankind's oldest sun shields: the parasol and fashioned a heat-resistant 24-by-28-foot makeshift sun umbrella for Skylab using telescoping fiberglass fishing rods to build his prototype. In 1971, when astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. wanted to test his golf swing on the surface of the moon, Kinzler helped design a 6-iron golf club head then had it attached to a lunar-sampling scoop. Emerging from his spacecraft, astronaut Shepard hit two golf balls with it. Sports trivia buffs remember that he shanked the first ball but connected solidly with the second. Shepard claimed the two golf balls traveled "miles and miles." Kinzler and his team also figured out a way to display the U.S. flag on the moon devising collapsible staffs that made the flags appear to be flapping in the moon's airless environment. Kinzler told the Houston Chronicle that he was distressed by conspiracy theorists who pointed to the rippling in the moon-planted flags as proof that the lunar landing by Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin in 1969 was a hoax. The moon, after all, has no air as we know it. "The reason for that ripple is so simple you wouldn't believe," said Kinzler. "I put an aluminum telescoping tube in the top, just like you have on some curtain rods. There's a latch on it, with a hinge that allows it to be pulled out, and as they extended the tube, the flag rippled. That's all."