Cary

"Loring’s First Principle" (PBF#267): http://www.pbfcomics.com/267/

“The story of a man who takes his skin off for his girlfriend, and why it probably wasn’t the best idea…”

He Took His Skin Off For Me is an adaptation of an original short story by award-winning writer Maria Hummer. It is a story about the sacrifices we make for the person we love and the trouble we encounter when the sacrifices become one-sided. The film is humorous and touching, yet uncomfortable, leaving you feeling for the struggles of both characters.

Director Ben Aston turned to Kickstarter to successfully fund the film, which used no CGI whatsoever. Ben brought in SFX legend Colin Arthur (Never Ending Story, 2001: Space Odyssey) to help solve the challenge of creating a skinless man. It took 8 hours a day and 1,152 muscle pieces to transform actor Sebasian Armesto (Anonymous, Pirates of the Caribbean) from a normal human being into a walking slab of bloody meat.

He must have been quite fit as there’s no fat on him whatsoever! The blood may have been a problem, but globules of fat would have left hard-to-remove grease stains everywhere.

Take a look at the Behind the Scenes of He Took His Skin Off For Me to learn more about the story origin and makeup process!

 

 

HughPickens.com writes Jennifer Abel writes at the LA Times that according to a recent survey (PDF), over 80% of Americans says they support "mandatory labels on foods containing DNA," roughly the same number that support the mandatory labeling of GMO foods "produced with genetic engineering." Ilya Somin, writing about the survey at the Washington Post, suggested that a mandatory label for foods containing DNA might sound like this: "WARNING: This product contains deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The Surgeon General has determined that DNA is linked to a variety of diseases in both animals and humans. In some configurations, it is a risk factor for cancer and heart disease. Pregnant women are at very high risk of passing on DNA to their children." The report echoes a well-known joke/prank wherein people discuss the dangers of the chemical "dihydrogen monoxide" also known as hydrogen oxide and hydrogen hydroxide. Search online for information about dihydrogen monoxide, and you'll find a long list of scary-sounding and absolutely true warnings about it: the nuclear power industry uses enormous quantities of it every year. Dihydrogen monoxide is used in the production of many highly toxic pesticides, and chemical weapons banned by the Geneva Conventions. Dihydrogen monoxide is found in all tumors removed from cancer patients, and is guaranteed fatal to humans in large quantities and even small quantities can kill you, if it enters your respiratory system. In 2006, in Louisville, Kentucky, David Karem, executive director of the Waterfront Development Corporation, a public body that operates Waterfront Park, wished to deter bathers from using a large public fountain. "Counting on a lack of understanding about water's chemical makeup," he arranged for signs reading: "DANGER! – WATER CONTAINS HIGH LEVELS OF HYDROGEN – KEEP OUT" to be posted on the fountain at public expense.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I never wanted a peek into the sex life of orthodox Jews — it’s just too sad. Religion really does wreck people.

“She’d just found out what and where her clitoris is, after her third child,” Marcus said. “She’d told her OB-GYN that she was having pain,” and during their conversation he informed her about her anatomy. Merely having this basic knowledge put her ahead of plenty of Marcus’s Orthodox patients, who tend to be from the Satmar sect, one of the most strictly observant groups within Hasidic Judaism. Their circumscribed upbringings, in sections of Brooklyn or in Monsey, N.Y., a hamlet north of New York City, have been utterly insular, their worlds devoid of secular books, let alone television and the Internet. About sexuality, their minds have been kept free of information and infused with fear. “They have zero — zero — connection to pleasure,” Marcus said. “And there’s no vocabulary to start with them. We have an intake form to fill out, and they get to ‘orgasm’ and go to the receptionist and ask, ‘What is this?’ ” When Marcus begins to explore whether they’ve ever been aroused, they have no understanding of the concept.

But if she learns what a clitoris and orgasms and arousal are, she might be less devout!

To me, that would be a good thing. To religion, the worst thing in the world.

What would you do if you accidentally broke one of the world’s most valuable relics?

Glue it back together? Quickly? Before anyone noticed?

Well, yes, that might be what you would do, because you don’t work in a museum and you’re not a conservator. (Unless you do and are, in which case, sorry.) But someone who works in a museum would know better. Someone who works in a museum would take the relic to the conservation department, where people who are specifically trained to care for works of art and artifacts would figure out how to fix the damage … right?

Unfortunately, when faced with this exact situation, someone who works at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo opted for plan A — hasty gluing — and now the over-3,300-year-old gold funeral mask of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, which is pretty much the image representing Egyptian pharaohs and an entire ancient epoch in the Western popular imagination, sports a crusty-looking wedge of epoxy connecting its beard to its face.

The incident occurred last year but was only just reported today and, quite unsurprisingly, no one has been able to say who’s responsible. The AP story that broke the news is full of shadowy passive voice, an unidentified “he,” and conservators who’ll only speak on condition of anonymity. It’s not even clear “whether the beard was knocked off by accident while the mask’s case was being cleaned, or was removed because it was loose” — which seems, I dunno, like kind of an important distinction.

Oh, also: “Another museum conservator, who was present at the time of the repair, said that epoxy had dried on the face of the boy king’s mask and that a colleague used a spatula to remove it, leaving scratches.”

Wait, wait — a conservator was there when all this was going down?

I don’t know, folks, the curse of the pharaohs may yet prove real. Or maybe we’re just trying to find excuses for being idiot humans.

Scientists at the University of Rochester have created new metal surfaces that are super water repellent, using short intense laser blasts. Because these surfaces don't accumulate water, they are self-cleaning and resistant to both corrosion and ice, making them good candidates for solar panels, aerofoils, and even toilets. The researchers published their findings yesterday in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Think you've seen this effect before? We'll explore how these new surfaces were made, what they can do, and how they are very different from two other effects you may be thinking of.

A water droplet bounces off the hydrophobic laser-etched metal. The parallel micro-grooves are just visible. Image courtesy of J. Adam Fenster, University of Rochester

A Multipurpose Surface

Two scientists at the University of Rochester, Chunlei Guo and Anatoliy Vorobyev, were inspired by examples of water-repellent biological surfaces like the lotus leaf and the wings of the Morpho butterfly to create the metal analog. Water-repellent surfaces in nature often have a pattern of micro-and nano-scale ridges which helps make them remarkably resistant to wet.

The water-repellent properties of the lotus leaf. Credit: Adapted from Dilip Muralidaran via flickr

To replicate this fine texture onto the surface of metals, Guo and his team used femtosecond laser pulses to etch parallel micro-scale ridges into platinum, titanium, and brass. This process also created nano-sized divets and structures on top of the micro ridges, similar to the pattern observed in natural water-repellent surfaces.

The team found that once this newly-etched metal was exposed to air, carbon from CO₂ accumulated onto the metal and further increased its repellent properties.

As this movie shows, even water droplets with the smallest amount of energy bounce and skid off the etched metal surface. And tilting the metal by only 4 degrees is enough to cause stationary droplets to immediately slide off, taking any dust or dirt with them. These properties classify the metals as self-cleaning superhydrophobic surfaces.


Because of the micro- and nano-scale ridges, the etched metals also absorb more than 95 percent of the visible light that falls on them, making them appear velvet black.

The self-cleaning, light-absorbing, water-repellent combo means these metals could be used to create things like a self-cleaning toilet uses far less water than ordinary toilets and solar panels that efficiently trap light and resist corrosion, dirt, and ice.

Does this water-repellent effect still look familiar? Here are two water-repellent effects that achieve hydrophobicity through very different processes.

It is not Teflon

Since the 1950s, a Teflon coating has been gracing the surfaces of non-stick pots and pans. Telfon, or polytetrafluoroethylene, is a chain of carbon and flourine that is extremely unreactive, low-friction, and unattractive to water.

Water molecule: one oxygen (red) bonded to two hydrogens (white). Credit: public domain

This is because the water molecule is polar, meaning it has a positively-charged side and a negatively-charged side. Polar molecules are attracted to other polar molecules and try to minimize their contact with neutral substances like Teflon.

Therefore distinct droplets of water form over a Teflon surface, similar to the droplets on Guo and Vorobyev's etched metals. But Teflon is much less water resistant; drops on a teflon surface will stick until the surface is tilted more than about 70 degrees compared to only 4 degrees with the new etched metals.

It is not the Leidenfrost effect

Sticking with the cooking theme, you may have noticed some strange behavior when water hits a very, very hot pan. Instead of immediately evaporating, distinct droplets form and skid across the pan, hanging around for far longer than is sensible at such high temperatures.

This is known as the Leidenfrost effect, named after Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost who described the phenomenon in 1756. More recently over the past decade, physicists have found that the Leidenfrost effect allows droplets to climb uphill. This inspired University of Bath undergraduate students in 2013 to build a Leidenfrost maze, in which droplets ricochet through a complex maze of hot, racheted inclines. They also created this cool video.

The Leidenfrost Effect, where a vapor layer levitates and insulates a drop of liquid. Credit: Vystrix Nexoth via Wikimedia Commons

The Leidenfrost effect occurs when a surface is heated to well above the boiling point of a liquid.

When a drop hits the hot surface, the bottom layer immediately vaporizes and levitates the drop on top. Since gas is a much better insulator than liquid, the drop is protected from the high surface temperature and remains liquid much longer before evaporating.

The Leidenfrost effect is the reason that you can quickly stick a finger in liquid nitrogen without harm; a layer of nitrogen gas between your finger and the liquid insulates you for a short time.

But yesterday's paper does not describe the Leidenfrost effect, which requires a very high temperature to work. Guo and Vorobyev's etched hydrophobic metals work at any temperature, and unlike Teflon coatings, won't peel off over time.

The team hopes their technique can find practical applications in a range of water-repellent, self-cleaning products, particularly in the developing world where clean water is scarce.

[video]

When I considered how I might become a fossil, I mostly thought about the environment I’d have to be entombed in. Desert. Seafloor. Lakebed. These are all pretty typical burial spots that rely on sand, mud, or silt. But I hadn’t yet heard of an even better option when I wrote that piece. As it turns out, entombment in penguin guano is a great way to preserve bodies for thousands of years.

Not just any penguins will do. It has to be Adélie penguins. These amphibious Antarctic birds breed on solid ground – not ice – and carefully select pebbles to create their nests. That’s what traps their guano. As the penguins create a crap cap on their breeding ground, they preserve the remains of their meals and their deceased neighbors within a mix of sand, pebbles, and guano. And while they start off as relatively dark at first, the deep layers of penguin leavings eventually turn pink from the krill in the Adélie diet. In some places, these easily-identifiable layers are over three feet thick.

The Russian biologist E.E. Syroechkovsky named these bird-created deposits “ornithogenic soils” in 1959, and, as University of North Carolina ecologist Steven Emslie and coauthors review in a new paper, the bird dirt has become a treasure trove of information about life since the Ice Age.

While chinstrap and gentoo penguins also create ornithogenic soils, their records pale in comparison to that of their cousin. Adélie penguins have created expansive deposits that go back over 40,000 years in some places, allowing researchers to see how the birds coped with the world’s last great expansion of ice. While Adélie penguins thrived in the Antarctic’s Ross Sea prior to 20,000 years ago, for example, they disappeared as ice overtook their breeding grounds. They only returned when warmer temperatures released their breeding grounds from ice after 18,000 years ago.

And the penguin-made fossil record preserves even finer details. In addition to squid beaks and fish “earstones” that made their way through the avian digestive system, Emslie and colleagues point out, the soils also contain the bodies and bones of the penguins themselves. Some researchers have even uncovered complete penguin “mummies” within ornithogenic soils. The cold, dry conditions at the breeding grounds kept the bird remains in excellent condition, allowing paleogeneticists to extract and study DNA from penguin populations through time. That’s not to mention the additional geochemical insights drawn from some of the fossil and subfossil remains, such as that Adélie and gentoo penguins started eating more krill about 200 years ago – right when whalers and fur trappers slaughtered many of the whales and seals in the southern seas.

Will I ever request that my earthly remains be laid bare on an Adélie penguin colony? Despite the preservation potential, probably not. I’d rather my bones wind up in a museum. But as long as I’m alive, I’ll look forward to the Ice Age details ecologists extract from penguin plop.

[Hat-tip to Jacquelyn Gill for pointing out the Emslie et al. paper to me.]

Reference:

Emslie, S., Polito, M., Brasso, R., Patterson, W., Sun, L. 2014. Ornithogenic soils and the paleoecology of pygoscelid penguins in Antarctica. Quaternary International. 352: 4-15. doi: 10.1016/j.quaint.2014.07.031

Rachel* has really outdone herself this time. This is just all kinds of brilliant.

* Rachel was also involved in the lab’s “Voyage of the Beagle” deck.

With all of the various web applications we use nowadays, it can be daunting to remember all of those passwords. Many people turn to password management software to help with this. Rather than remembering 20 passwords, you can store them all in a (presumably) secure database that’s protected by a single strong password. It’s a good idea in theory, but only if the software is actually secure. [Matteo] was recently poking around an Android password management software and made some disturbing discoveries.

The app claimed to be using DES encryption, but [Matteo] wanted to put this claim to the test. He first decompiled the app to get a look at the code. The developer used some kind of code obfuscation software but it really didn’t help very much. [Matteo] first located the password decryption routine.

He first noticed that the software was using DES in ECB mode, which has known issues and really shouldn’t be used for this type of thing. Second, the software simply uses an eight digit PIN as the encryption key. This only gives up to 100 million possible combinations. It may sound like a lot, but to a computer that’s nothing. The third problem was that if the PIN is less than eight characters, the same digits are always padded to the end to fill in the blanks. Since most people tend to use four digit pins, this can possibly lower the total number of combinations to just ten thousand.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it actually gets worse. [Matteo] found a function that actually stores the PIN in a plain text file upon generation. When it comes time to decrypt a password, the application will check the PIN you enter with the one stored in the plain-text file. So really, you don’t have to crack the encryption at all. You can simply open the file and reveal the PIN.

[Matteo] doesn’t name the specific app he was testing, but he did say in the Reddit thread that the developer was supposedly pushing out a patch to fix these issues. Regardless, it goes to show that before choosing a password manager you should really do some research and make sure the developer can be trusted, lest your secrets fall into the wrongs hands.

[via Reddit]

Filed under: security hacks

Each September the Alaskan wood frogs freeze. Two-thirds of their body water turns to ice. If you picked them up, they would not move. If you bent one of their legs, it would break. Their hearts stop beating, their blood no longer flows and their glucose levels sky rocket. BUt then during the spring, they thaw out and return to normal. (Source)

The building that housed the world's first Taco Bell is under "imminent threat of demolition," according to the Downey Conservancy, a Downey-based preservation group. Although Downey is more famously recognized as the site of the oldest operating location for the world's largest hamburger chain, it is Taco Bell that built its first location within the city. The building, located at 7112 Firestone Blvd, was opened by founder Glen Bell in March 1962. Why did Taco Bell's founder, and one of the most famous names in fast food, choose Downey?

Fierce Magenta

Bloody Cherry

*heavy breathing*

catasters:

"I Don’t know about you, but i’m ready for the New Year’s Eve…"