Jundt

When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a "Major Discovery" (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately. By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the BICEP microwave telescope located at the South Pole. Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it's now clear that we've detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size.

BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, was built specifically to measure the polarization of light left over from the early Universe. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), encodes a lot of information about the physical state of the cosmos from its earliest moments. Most observatories (such as Planck and WMAP) have mapped temperature fluctuations in the CMB, which are essential for determining the contents of the Universe.

Polarization is the orientation of the electric field of light, which conveys additional information not available from the temperature fluctuations. While much of CMB polarization is due to later density fluctuations that gave rise to galaxies, theory predicts that some of it came from primordial gravitational waves. Those waves are ripples in space-time left over from quantum fluctuations in the Universe's earliest moments.

Lots of people who are extremely skeptical of herbal medicines rely on one every day. It changes their metabolism, increases their focus, and alters their bodies in a variety of ways. It's called caffeine, and in many ways it's a wonder drug. Now, researchers have added yet another item to the list of things caffeine can do: it helps consolidate memories.

The team behind this work, based at Johns Hopkins and University of California-Irvine, says that teasing apart the effects of caffeine is challenging. "The general consensus among past studies is that caffeine has little or no effect on long-term [memory] retention," they write. But those studies are complicated by the fact that the caffeine is usually administered with a sufficient lead time to make sure it's having an impact while people are doing their memorizations. In those circumstances, all the other effects of the drug—"increased arousal, vigilance, attention, and processing speed"—can also influence the degree to which memories are formed.

To avoid this issue, the researchers didn't administer the caffeine until after participants had performed an image memorization task. Twenty-four hours later, they tested their memories with a mixture of images: some were the ones from the day before, some were completely new, and some were similar to the previous ones—called lures, they were meant to tax a user's memory.

In the world of personal computing, hacks that exploit memory errors to allow for the execution of arbitrary (and often malicious) code are far from surprising anymore. What's more surprising is that such "arbitrary code" bugs are also present on the relatively locked-down computers inside of video game consoles.

This was demonstrated quite dramatically last week at Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ), an annual marathon fundraiser that this year raised over $1 million for the Prevent Cancer foundation. The event focuses on live speedruns of classic games by human players and included a blindfolded Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! run that ranks among the most impressive live video game playing performances I have ever seen. The most remarkable moment of the weeklong marathon, though, came when a robotic player took "total control" of an unmodified Super Mario World cartridge, reprogramming it on the fly to run simple versions of Pong and Snake simply by sending a precise set of inputs through the standard controller ports on the system.

The two-and-a-half minute video of this incredible exploit is pretty tough to follow if you're not intimately familiar with the state of emulator-assisted speedruns. At first, it looks like the game must have been hacked in some way to allow for things like multiple on-screen Yoshis, item boxes that spawn multiple 1-ups, and the ability for Mario to carry items while riding on Yoshi. In actuality, these seeming impossibilities are just glitches that have been discovered over the years through painstaking emulated playthroughs by the community at TASVideos (short for tool-assisted speedrun videos).

Power is intoxicating. Everyone loves having the ability to make their decisions into reality — to think "this should be something that happens," and then actually be able to make that thing happen. 

It is also dangerous. 

And it is especially dangerous when applied to four-year-olds. 

Four-year-olds lack the experience to wield power responsibly. They have no idea what to do with it or how to control it.

The dinosaur costume was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. The previous Halloween, which was the first Halloween I could actually remember, my parents had dressed me as a giant crayon, and the whole experience had been really uncomfortable for me.

But being a dinosaur felt natural.

And powerful. 

The feeling had been slowly intensifying ever since I put the costume on that morning, and, as I stood there in the middle of the classroom, staring off into the distance in an unresponsive power trance, it finally hit critical mass.

I had to find some way to use it. Any way. Immediately.

The other children screamed and fled. The teacher chased me, yelling at me to stop. But I couldn't stop.  I was a mindless juggernaut, a puppet for forces far greater than myself. I had completely lost control of my body. 

All I knew was that being a dinosaur felt very different from being a person, and I was doing things that I had never even dreamed of doing before.

Of course, I had always had the ability to do these things — even as a person — but I didn't know that. I'd just assumed that I was unable.  As a dinosaur, I didn't have any of those assumptions.  It felt like I could do whatever I wanted without fear of repercussions.

The repercussions were also exactly the same as they were before I became a dinosaur.

I just experienced them differently.

My parents had to come pick me up at noon that day.  The teacher explained that it must have been all the Halloween candy.  "Some kids really can't handle sugar," she said.  "It turns them into little monsters."

I suppose it was a reasonable enough conclusion, but it only served as a distraction from the real problem.

The thing about being an unstoppable force is that you can really only enjoy the experience of being one when you have something to bash yourself against. You need to have things trying to stop you so that you can get a better sense of how fast you are going as you smash through them. And whenever I was inside the dinosaur costume, that is the only thing I wanted to do.

I'm sure the correlation started to seem rather strong after a while. I'd find some way to get sugar into myself, and then — drunk on the power of doing something I wasn't supposed to —I would lapse into psychotic monster mode. To any reasonable observer, it would appear as though I was indeed having a reaction to the sugar.

My parents were so confused when the terror sprees continued even after the house had been stripped of sugar. They were sure they had gotten rid of all of it. . . did I have a stash somewhere? Was I eating bugs or something?

They still weren't suspicious of the costume.  

I lost weeks in a power-fueled haze. I often found myself inside the costume without even realizing I had put it on. One moment, I would be calmly drawing a picture, and the next I'd be robotically stumbling toward my closet where the dinosaur costume was and putting myself inside it.

It started to happen almost against my will.

Surely my parents made the connection subconsciously long before they became aware of what was really going on. After weeks of chaos, each instance punctuated by the presence of the costume, I have to imagine that the very sight of the thing would have triggered some sort of Pavlovian fear response.

They did figure it out eventually, though.

And the costume was finally taken away from me.

I was infuriated at the injustice of it all. I had become quite dependent on the costume, and it felt like part of my humanity was being forcibly and maliciously stripped away.  I cursed my piddling human powers and their uselessness in the situation. If only I could put on the costume . . .  just one more time.

But that was the costume's only weakness — it couldn't save itself. I had to watch helplessly as it disappeared inside a trash bag. 

There was nothing I could do.

And so my reign of power came to an end, and I slowly learned to live as a person again.

On the same day that the latest installment of the Jurassic Park film series has been confirmed, a study published in PLOS One has detailed experiments that seem to demonstrate once and for all that dinosaurs will never again walk the Earth.

The 1993 film, based on a book by Michael Crichton, depicts a theme park island filled with dinosaurs, resurrected from ancient DNA extracted from fossilized mosquitoes trapped in amber. For a while, that science didn’t seem to be entirely fiction. In the early 1990s, several scientists announced they had extracted DNA from insects fossilized in amber as long as 130 million years ago. Insects from this time in Earth’s history, the early Cretaceous period, would have flown among dinosaurs (including giant, long-necked sauropods, among the largest creatures ever on land) as well as creatures such as flying pterosaurs, swimming plesiosaurs, feathered birds, and mammals.

This Lebanese amber was until recently the oldest in the world, older than the more common Dominican amber, which formed around 16 million years ago and the 49-million-year-old amber of the Baltic. But last year, tiny mites were found for the first time in amber dating from the Triassic period—230 million years ago.

Another state will see the adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards, a set of educational guidelines that are intended to improve science education in public schools. Kentucky governor Steve Beshear has announced that he will implement the standards in the state's public education system. But that move was forced on him after a legislative committee had rejected them earlier in the week.

Kentucky was one of the states involved in crafting the Next Generation Science Standards, and its school board approved them earlier this year. But that approval came despite a significant public outcry, with people objecting to the standards' content on evolution on religious grounds and calling the whole approach of setting education standards both fascism and socialism.

With the board's approval, the standards moved on to the legislature. And, in contrast to the school board, the legislature chose to listen to the public outcry. Earlier this week, the Administrative Regulations Review Subcommittee rejected their adoption in a 5 to 1 vote, citing the same public opposition that the school board had dismissed.