Nate Haduch

• Anne Hathaway had a wardrobe malfunction at The Critics’ Choice Awards, but luckily JGL was there with one of his hitrecord pins to save the day. HOW CONVENIENT! -HitRecordJoe
• From The Vault: The Oral History Of The Warriors -TheFader
• Just A Bunch Of Animated GIFs Of Bobby Flay Working Out -Eater
• Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein delight The View gals -Hulu
• Neil DeGrasse Tyson talks to Anthony Bourdain on StarTalk -Nerdist
• Folks are Al Roker-ing themselves over this early 30 Rock pilot (Rachel Dratch plays “Jenna DeCarlo”) -BuzzFeed
• Soul Men: The Making of The Blues Brothers (spolier alert: there was a budget for cocaine) -VanityFair
• The Audacity of Lena Dunham, And Her Admirable Commitment To Making Us Look At Her Naked -xoJane
• Have you experienced “Greg Rutter’s Definitve List Of The Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet In 2012 Unless You’re A Loser Or Old Or Something”? -YouShouldHaveSeenThis2012

hellogiggles:

VIDEO CHAT KARAOKE SPECIAL: ZOOEY DESCHANEL & JOE GORDON-LEVITT – ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING NEW YEAR’S EVE?’ (NANCY WILSON)

The outrageously productive San Francisco fuzz rocker Ty Segall released three albums last year, but that’s apparently not enough. Segall has lately teamed up with his touring guitarist Charlie Mootheart to form a semi-mysterious new duo called Fuzz, and the new band just quietly released a couple of loud songs on a new 7″. “This Time I Got A Reason” and “Fuzz’s Fourth Dream” both nudge Segall’s sound even further into pedal-mashing stomp, edging ever closer to stoner-metal territory. Both songs rule hard, and you can hear them below.

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The 30 Rock cast and crew finished shooting the series finale Wednesday night after working together on seven seasons of the critically-acclaimed show. Kevin Brown, who plays Dot Com on the show, tweeted this picture (embedded at its full size below) of the 30 Rock gang all together one last time. Tina Fey tells Zap2it about the last day of filming: "Last night there was a delay and as happens every time in seven years it ended up with Tracy [Morgan] singing songs from Thriller. It was the same three Michael Jackson songs so many times. Last night, it turned into an impromptu break dance party." 30 Rock's final season still has five episodes left, with the two-part finale set to air January 31st.

Hit the jump for a collection of photos from the last day of shooting Wednesday and the wrap party (complete with elaborate cakes) last night posted by Kevin Brown:

Photo credit: Kevin Brown

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Motion sickness is a mismatch between what your body and your brain is experiencing, says Dr. Sujana Chandrasekhar, director of New York Otology and ENT surgeon at the New York Head and Neck Institute.

It's experienced when the central nervous system receives conflicting information from the inner ear, eyes, and both the pressure and sensory receptors, found in our joints, muscles, and spine. Our sense of balance is controlled by the interaction of these systems.

"In motion sickness the fluids of the inner ear are moving along with you in the moving vehicle. The brain is interpreting that movement, [and] instead of saying ‘yes you are in a moving car,' it's interpreting it as an incorrect stimulus," Chandrasekhar says. This will often cause some sort of nausea.

Unfortunately, motion sickness is one of those things that just can't be "cured." On the bright side you can use medication to reduce the sensation. "Medication will blunt the effects but there's no way to get rid of it," says Dr. Hamid Djalilian, director of Neurotology at the University of California Irvine.

What you should do, if you're in a car for example, is sit up front. This way you'll be able to anticipate motion and fix your eyes on a point.

People often think they should close their eyes when they're experiencing motion sickness. But this action won't really reduce the sensation, says Dr. Chandrasekhar, and it's just about the worst thing you can do. "Closing your eyes shuts off a very powerful override. If you open your eyes and focus, either on a single point in the distance, or focus as if you're driving the car, you can actually override the incorrect interpretation of the ear input."

Another prevention mechanism that doesn't work is wearing those magnetic bracelets that supposedly help with balance, "[they] actually have not been found to be effective," Djalilian says. It's a psychological relief; it doesn't really get rid of your symptoms.

But there is a more natural approach to relieving the sensation of motion sickness: ginger. All you have to do is suck on it. It's very effective, says Chandrasekhar, and it will calm your stomach down.

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.

1989

GravityLight: lighting for the developing countries from T4 on Vimeo.

Kerosene lamps used in off-grid, rural areas are a major problem. They're bad for people's health and the environment's. One startup's solution is to tap another, greener resource, something we all have in abundance: gravity.

The invention, GravityLight, does exactly what the name suggests: It keeps a light going through the power of gravity. As an attached weight falls, it pulls a cord through the center of the light, powering a dynamo. That dynamo converts the energy from the falling weight into power for the light. (It's the same idea as a hand-cranked device, just more vertical.) The weight can be set in a few seconds, and as it slowly reaches Earth, enough energy is generated to keep a light working for 30 minutes. As long as it's set every 30 minutes, it makes for a green, battery-free, continuous stream of light. Other, similar devices like battery chargers could be used through the same process, too.

The inventors say the gadgets can be sold now for less than $10, which would make a return on investment for owners three months after dumping kerosene lighting. And speaking of investments, the group has already shattered the goal for its Indiegogo campaign, meaning we'll hopefully see these in action soon.

[Treehugger]

Vanity Fair regularly runs a celebrity questionnaire in the pages of its magazine and for January they got Louis C.K. to do it. Somehow. Because he really didn't like doing it.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Not ever having to fill out this questionnaire.

What is your greatest fear?
You think I'm going to tell you that? You think I'm going to let you print my greatest fear in a national magazine? No sir. I will not, sir.

hellogiggles:

LET YOUR LADY CHILD COME OUT AND PLAY

by Santina Muha

http://bit.ly/TQP4Cb

This past weekend, Stephen Malkmus helped to celebrate the 40th anniversary one of his favorite albums, Can’s krautrock masterpiece Ege Bamyasi, by covering the album in full at Week-End Fest in Can’s hometown of Cologne, Germany. The local band Von Spar backed him up. Below, check out professional footage of Malkmus and Von Spar playing “One More Night,” “Pinch, and “Soup.”

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Sometimes, scientists need a hand. There's a lot of data to sift through, and now more than ever, the public can be part of that sifting. Take this fun new project: a crowdsourced hunt for star clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy.

An online program from the University of Washington, the University of Utah, and other partners lets any amateur astronomers take a look at images from the Hubble Space Telescope and search for star clusters in the galaxy. There's a lot of those clusters--as many as 2,500 in the images--but researchers have only found about 600, even after searching for months. (One big roadblock: Pattern-recognition software tends to skip over star clusters.)

That's where everyone else comes in. Volunteers can mark the images when they spot a cluster or galaxy in the background, and the researchers will pick up on it. There's even a fun bit of gallows humor in it: "We're on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy," the opening screen says. "Help researchers understand the awesomeness of the Andromeda galaxy, because one day we'll be in it..."

[University of Washington]

Amy Poehler paid a visit to the couch next to Conan O'Brien's desk last night, and the two (and Andy!) had a fun chat that covered a wide range of topics, like the time the Upright Citizens Brigade opened for Patti Smith at Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, Poehler and Tina Fey's upcoming Golden Globes hosting gig, and of course, embarrassing high school yearbooks photos. Conan should have just booted his other guests and continued this delightful conversation with Amy Poehler for the entire hour.

Hit the jump for the second part of the interview:

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What do empty thoughts look like? According to the artist Gustav Metzger, they look like the weird blobby object above. Metzger hooked up his brain to a robotic sculpting machine that carved away at a piece of Portland Stone based on the stimuli it received from Metzger's EEG readings as he tried to think of nothing at all. Titled "Null Object," the work is now on display at London's Work Gallery.

In other words, this is Gustav Metzger's Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, empirical proof that even when we try our hardest to think of nothing, there's always something going on up there.

[DesignWeek]

People have just won that ridiculous, record-breaking $579.9 million Powerball jackpot. Two people, even! But you know who didn't win the jackpot? A lot more people. This infographic shows exactly how crappy your chances are of winning the lottery--and how lucky today's winners really are.

[visaul.ly]

"It's just a fucking mediocre sitcom. I want people to laugh, and this isn't funny. And it ain't funny to me because I'm 67 years old and I've been doing this a long time and I've been making a lot of people laugh a lot better than this."

- Chevy Chase on 'Community' in one of those Dan Harmon voicemails.

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"If you watch Two and a Half Men, please stop watching Two and a Half Men, I'm on Two and a Half Men, and I don’t want to be on it. Please stop watching it, and filling your head with filth... People say it’s just entertainment. Do some research on the effects of television and your brain, and I promise you you’ll have a decision to make when it comes to television, especially with what you watch."

-Two and a Half Men's half man Angus T. Jones, railing against the evils of Two and a Half Men in a religious testimonial of some kind.

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Just in time for the holidays, the team at Je Shirt Company has released TWO different Jay Leno as Che Guevara t-shirts (Jay Guevara and Che Leno, respectively, obviously) at the possible ruination of their own families. Save their families!

"Are hops and marijuana related?"

I've fielded that question many times, usually after someone has sampled an especially resinous IPA -- although at least one PopSci editor asked me the same question when looking at a photo of the leaves of a hop plant.

The answer to that question is yes and no.

The fact that both Humulus lupulus (hops) and Cannabis sativa (marijuana) have similar organoleptic properties (taste and smell) could indicate a common ancestry--but it isn't proof. Lots of plants make similar aroma molecules, known as terpenes and terpenoid compounds, including lemons (which make limonene), lavender (linalool) and conifers (pinene) -- but none of them are closely related to cannabis or hops.

Terpenes are a class of organic compounds synthesized by cells. They all start with a particular base molecule, called isoprene. I won't go into terpene biosynthesis here, but it's important to remember that all terpenes are built up using one or more copies of isoprene. A few of the primary aroma terpenes in hops are myrcene, beta-pinene and alpha-humulene--these and similar aromatic compounds are also what give cannabis plants their characteristic smell.

Further, the major bitter compound in hops, the so-called alpha acids, aka humulone, is a terpenoid (derived from terpenes). The primary active ingredient in that dank you're smoking, the tetrahydrocannabinoids, are also terpenoids.

So, if terpenes are not exclusive to Humulus and Cannabis, how do we know they are related? The one nameless editor who noticed structural similarities in the two plants was more on the money.

Humulus and Cannabis are, in fact, two genera in the family Cannabinaceae, a taxonomic family that has endured a bit of a shakeup in recent history. In ye olden days of taxonomy, biologists would look for structural similarities between plants in order to group them. Botanically speaking, the leaves of plants in the Cannabinaceae family are generally palmately lobed and always have stipules. Additionally, they always have cystoliths (calcium carbonate crystals that sit in special organelles within the cell). Aside from "palmately lobed," none of this means a whole lot to me, either, so I guess we will have to take the plant taxonomists' word on it.

Before the 1990s, all of these physical similarities put hops and cannabis into a single family, under a larger order called Urticales. And so it stayed, until molecular biologists started running the DNA through sequencers looking for similarities between genes, when they found out that the order Urticales wasn't as special as they thought--it wasn't even its own order. The situation became so frustrating to the flowering-plant taxonomists that in 1998 they organized the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (like the Justice League, but with fewer secret identities) to sort the mess out. The APG published their take on the flowering-plant taxonomic system in 1998, and followed up with updates in 2003 and 2009.

(As an aside, microbiologists went through a similar problem. I am sure that most readers will remember the terms "gram positive" and "gram negative" from biology class, terms used to describe certain kinds of bacteria based on whether they could be dyed with crystal violet. That phenomenon, coupled with the shape of the bacterial cell (rod-shaped, round, or corkscrew), was the original basis for all bacterial taxonomy. In no surprise whatsoever, it turns out that shape is generally a piss-poor method to determine evolutionary relationships among bacteria. These days, microbiologists look at the sequence of the 16S ribosomal subunit to separate bacteria into different taxa.)

In 2002, a group of plant and molecular biologists in the US and UK looked at the structural characteristics, cellular organelles, latex-producing-properties (or lack thereof) and DNA sequences of a select number of genes for all of the plants originally in Urticales and related taxa. The upshot: by comparing sequences of rbcL, trnL-F, ndhF and matK DNA regions, they confirmed that Humulus and Cannabis were very closely related and belonged in a single family, Cannabinaceae. They also found that the Cannabinaceae family shares a common ancestor with other families, and thus all of those families needed to be lumped together. Confusingly, because Cannabinaceae is the older name, this bigger group is also called Cannabinaceae, under the order Rosales.

The upshot of all of this: 1) Don't become an angiosperm taxonomist unless you love frustration, because 2) taxonomy can be a giant pain in the butt. 3) Best thing to do is bust out a bottle of homebrew.

And yes, before you ask, homebrewers have made marijuana beer. Details online are thin, because the homebrew forums actively discourage discussion of it and the pothead forums are teeth-clenchingly imprecise. All I've found is 1) dry your bud first, then 2) don't add it to the boil without first soaking it in water to get the worst of the water-soluble tars out. I have no idea why people don't try to dry-pot their beer -- despite the worries I've read from these pot-brewers, the chances of contamination from the plant is very low, especially if you pasteurize it first. As for style, I've seen reports of a very dark ale recipe. Anything with a good malt backbone should be enough to dispel whatever gnarly flavors might develop. Finally, THC is alcohol soluble, so you probably want your beer to be in the 8% ABV range for maximum extraction. (Or just go the cheap and cheery route and extract it in vodka, then throw that in during bottling/kegging.)

And no, BeerSci has not tried any.

It really is morning in America! It’s been rumored for about one bazillion years, but now Kevin Shields is saying that My Bloody Valentine’s new album is just about ready and that it’ll be out by the end of the year. It’s November now! That means we’ll get the 21-years-later follow-up to Loveless sometime in the next eight weeks! Thanks, Obama!

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Messy San Franciscan garage punk Ty Segall is an unlikely recent entrant into the late-night musical-guest roundtable, and his thrashed-out tantrums will always look pretty incongruous on soundstages. Last night, he had David Letterman grinning with amusement when he and his band bashed out a raucous version of his Twins song “You’re The Doctor,” which ended when he screeched “go vote” into mic. Watch it below.

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Ken Mampel, the Floridian man who repeatedly edited the Wikipedia entry on Hurricane Sandy to remove any mention of climate change, has been blocked from Wikipedia for a period of 24 hours due to "edit warring" on the Hurricane Sandy page. He appealed the block and was denied, though he's not banned for good--he's encouraged to keep editing now that his block is lifted. Read more on his Talk page.