Watch this CDC map change from 1985 to 2010 -and get more colorful along the way. It shows the percentage of people medically defined as obese. Obesity was once an odd condition, but for the U.S. it just gets more common every year. The Atlantic has a list of the metropolitan areas that have the lowest and highest rates of obesity. Moving to Colorado will only help if you are willing to climb mountains, hike, and ski. Link
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Look How Quickly the U.S. Got Fat
Before his execution, the infamous pirate Captain Kidd claimed to have hidden 200 bars of gold somewhere in the world. Google has embedded his elaborate coded treasure map into Google Maps. You’ll have to use various tricks, such as applying heat to the image, to reveal the hidden symbols. Now let’s go get rich! ( Video Link ) Link -via @eruditechick
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Google Maps Features Treasure Map for April Fools’ Day
This image, shot by a photographer unknown to me, allegedly shows a wryneck ( Jynx torquilla ) pecking away at a tree branch. The head looks like a spindle, doesn’t it? -via TYWKIWDBI
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Woodpecker Shot at a Slow Shutter Speed
As the American economy has moved away from manufacturing to information services and the economy limps along, not keeping up with the number of people who need jobs, the U.S. Social Security Disability program has boomed. This boom covers up the real numbers of people who would otherwise be on welfare or counted among the unemployed. NPR looks at several factors that made this happen: for example, disability is for people who can no longer perform heavy labor, and don’t have the education or skills for other jobs. One woman I met, Ethel Thomas, is on disability for back pain after working many years at the fish plant, and then as a nurse’s aide. When I asked her what job she would have in her dream world, she told me she would be the woman at the Social Security office who weeds through disability applications. I figured she said this because she thought she’d be good at weeding out the cheaters. But that wasn’t it. She said she wanted this job because it is the only job she’s seen where you get to sit all day. At first, I found this hard to believe. But then I started looking around town. There’s the McDonald’s, the fish plant, the truck repair shop. I went down a list of job openings — Occupational Therapist, McDonald’s, McDonald’s, Truck Driver (heavy lifting), KFC, Registered Nurse, McDonald’s. And disability payments shift the expense of maintaining people without jobs away from states and onto the federal government. A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And the Public Consulting Group is glad to help. PCG is a private company that states pay to comb their welfare rolls and move as many people as possible onto disability. “What we’re offering is to work to identify those folks who have the highest likelihood of meeting disability criteria,” Pat Coakley, who runs PCG’s Social Security Advocacy Management team, told me. Other factors come into play, but the result is that 14 million Americans receive a disability check every month -and health care through Medicare. Learn more about the trend at NPR. Link
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The Startling Rise of Disability in America
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children switch from whole milk to a lower fat milk at age two. The conventional wisdom is that getting children used to reduced fat milk will help keep them at a healthy weight. Skim, 1%, or 2% milk has fewer calories per cup. It just makes sense, doesn’t it? So here’s where things gets confusing. A new study of preschool-aged children published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, a sister publication of the British Medical Journal, finds that low-fat milk was associated with higher weight. That’s right, kids drinking low-fat milk tended to be heavier. “We were quite surprised” by the findings, Dr. Mark DeBoer told me in an email. He and his co-author, Dr. Rebecca Scharf, both of the University of Virginia, had hypothesized just the opposite. But they found the relationship between skim-milk drinkers and higher body weights held up across all racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups. DeBoer says their data also show that low-fat milk did not restrain weight gain in preschoolers over time. This is not the first study to show such results, but the authors call for further research, as this study did not take into account what types of food the children were consuming or their total caloric intake. And scientists say sugary drinks make a bigger difference in overall child obesity. Link (Image credit: Flickr user David Goehring )
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Whole Milk Linked to Slimmer Kids
There it is! Where’s Higgs Boson T-Shirt by Mike Jacobsen | More Higgs boson T-Shirts After the big announcement last year, physicists have made it official. They have indeed found the Higgs boson: Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the “God particle,” to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name. But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn’t collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics. Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is a Higgs. Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience has the full story: Link
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Higgs Boson is Now Official!
What do you lay awake at night worrying about? Are your worries different than those far smarter than you? Perhaps. John Brockman of Edge magazine asked what the world’s most intelligent brainiacs – including Physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, technologist Tim O’Reilly, musician Brian Eno, The Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb – about their professional worries and got a lot of responses. One hundred and fifty distinct worries, in fact. Thankfully, VICE’s Motherboard blog has summarized it for us : 1. The proliferation of Chinese eugenics. – Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist. 2. Black swan events, and the fact that we continue to rely on models that have been proven fraudulent. – Nassem Nicholas Taleb 3. That we will be unable to defeat viruses by learning to push them beyond the error catastrophe threshold. – William McEwan, molecular biology researcher 4. That pseudoscience will gain ground. – Helena Cronin, author, philospher 5. That the age of accelerating technology will overwhelm us with opportunities to be worried. – Dan Sperber, social and cognitive scientist 6. Genuine apocalyptic events. The growing number of low-probability events that could lead to the total devastation of human society. – Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society 7. The decline in science coverage in newspapers. – Barbara Strauch, New York Times science editor 8. Exploding stars, the eventual collapse of the Sun, and the problems with the human id that prevent us from dealing with them. — John Tooby, founder of the field of evolutionary psychology 9. That the internet is ruining writing. – David Gelernter, Yale computer scientist 10. That smart people–like those who contribute to Edge–won’t do politics. –Brian Eno, musician 11. That there will be another supernova-like financial disaster. –Seth Lloyd, professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering at MIT 12. That search engines will become arbiters of truth. –W. Daniel Hillis, physicist 13. The dearth of desirable mates is something we should worry about, for “it lies behind much human treachery and brutality.” –David M. Buss, professor of psychology at U of T 14. “I’m worried that our technology is helping to bring the long, postwar consensus against fascism to an end.” –David Bodanis, writer, futurist 15. That we will continue to uphold taboos on bad words. –Benhamin Bergen, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, UCS Humanity, start worrying! Or, you can just accept it all, like Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, who said: I’ve given up asking questions. l merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me… and marvel stupidly. Read the original post over at Edge: Link | Summary at Motherboard blog
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What Really Smart People Worry About At Night
Bismuth (Image: fluor_doublet/R. Tanaka/Flickr ) We all know the periodic table of the elements from high school chemistry, but have you ever wondered what the actual chemical elements look like? Japanese chemist and photographer R. Tanaka is on a mission to photograph the world’s most photogenic elements and we dare say he succeeded with flying colors. Check out his website and Flickr page to see more wonderful images of the elements. Osmium Palladium Monoclinic sulfur Oxidized arsenic Gold crystal Lead Platinum Ruthenium Tellurium Oxidized vanadium View more over at R. Tanaka’s Flickr set: The Elements – via Visual News
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Gorgeous Photography of The Elements
How does he do it? How does cerkahegyzo manage to shape the lead so precisely without shattering it? I want to see a video of him at work. Gallery -via Twisted Sifter
Beam of electrons moving in a circle, due to the presence of a magnetic field. Purple light is emitted along the electron path, due to the electrons colliding with gas molecules in the bulb. (Photo: Marcin Bialek ) Oh, how I love you guys. In our recent post A Fiery Dance on the Sun , Neatoramanaut PlasmaGryphon kindly took the time to explain to us the physics behind solar flares. In the explanation , there was a link to Wikipedia article on Lorentz force , where I found this fascinating image of a circular beam of electrons in a Teltron tube . Neat, huh? ( Thanks PlasmaGryphon! )
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Circular Beam of Electrons