Who wouldn't click on the headline "Animal Invisibility Cloak Makes Cat and Fish Vanish"? Those of us who did were rewarded with one of the cooler science videos in recent memory, in which aforementioned animals did indeed vanish when they ducked behind aforementioned cloak, which was actually made of a special glass invention. Read on for details.
Developments
Linguistics
The Influence of Geography
In what purports to be the first study of how altitude affects the structure of language, a linguist has found that languages spoken at higher elevations, where the air is thinner, are far more likely to include ejective consonants, which are produced by closing the back of the throat and emitting a burst of air.
The linguist, Caleb Everett of the University of Miami, "suggests that the sounds are more popular at altitude because lower air pressure may make it easier to produce the burst of air that is a key characteristic of ejective consonants," said Scientific American, which posted a podcast that included some of the sounds.
Of the 567 languages Professor Everett studied, only about 20 percent of them had these types of consonants, also called glottal consonants, which do not occur in English and are hard for English speakers to produce. (One Web site suggests holding your breath and trying to make a "k" sound as loudly as you can, to produce an ejective "k' ").
Languages that use ejective consonants are concentrated in the Caucasus Mountains (where they include Georgian), the Andes and the southern Africa plateau, among other regions. "We hypothesize that ejective sounds may help to mitigate rates of water vapor loss through exhaled air," Professor Everett wrote in his paper.
Environment
Antarctica Melting From Below
Early Antarctic explorers used all sorts of colorful words for icebergs — "growlers," "bergy bits" — as well as the geological term "calved" for when a wall of ice would break noisily from the Antarctic coastline and start floating north. (Some wrote in their diaries that they could tell how recently an iceberg had calved by how degraded it looked).
More recently, the calving of enormous icebergs, some the size of Delaware, has been blamed for the worrisome loss of ice from the Antarctic continent. Now, a new paper contends there is more to the story: Warmer oceans are melting the ice shelves from below, causing just as much ice loss as calving, if not more.
The "basal melt" phenomenon "accounted for 55 percent of all Antarctic ice shelf mass loss from 2003 to 2008, an amount much higher than previously thought," according to NASA, which was involved in the study. The authors say that theirs is the first comprehensive survey of Antarctic ice shelves and that it could help predict rises in sea levels.
"The traditional view on Antarctic mass loss is it is almost entirely controlled by iceberg calving," said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine. "Our study shows melting from below by the ocean waters is larger, and this should change our perspective on the evolution of the ice sheet in a warming climate."
Physics
About That Invisibility Cloak
A team of scientists specializing in optics, physics and engineering has built several structures that — from certain angles — make objects behind them disappear as effectively as that shimmery shroud that Harry, Ron and Hermione use in the Harry Potter movies.
The real-life cloaks are fashioned from "thin panels of glass that make objects invisible by bending light around them," The Guardian reported, and they are considered "better than earlier versions that worked only with polarized light, or with microwaves instead of the visible wavelengths that humans see in."
In a demonstration video, a goldfish swims behind a cloak placed in its tank; in another, a cat steps in and out of a cloak placed on a table. In both cases, only the parts of the animal that are not behind the cloak are visible.
The scientists said in a paper that their work has "made a step toward practical application of invisibility cloaking in hiding large-scale creatures in plain sight," which could be useful in "security, entertainment and surveillance."
Psychology
Our Legos Are Getting Angrier
A lot of scientists have fond feelings for Lego, the bricks behind many an engineering career. Christoph Bartneck, a researcher in New Zealand who studies how humans interact with robots, took a different professional interest: He wanted to size up the emotions of the little plastic people who reside in the miniature brick worlds.
He and colleagues photographed 3,655 plastic characters released by Lego from 1975 to 2010 — "Minifigures," in the company's parlance — and identified 628 faces. They asked 264 American adults to rate the figurines' emotions in an online survey.
The findings? "The two most frequent expressions are happiness and anger, and the proportion of happy faces is decreasing over time," the researchers wrote in a paper. Professor Bartneck, a Minifigure enthusiast who compiles an annual catalog, said on New Zealand television that psychologists could find the Lego people — with their range of facial expressions, from confident to concerned — helpful in working with clients who have trouble expressing feelings.
On the down side, the researchers wrote: "We cannot help but wonder how the move from only positive faces to an increasing number of negative faces impacts how children play. The children that grow up with Lego today will remember not only smileys, but also anger and fear in the Minifigures' faces."
Space
Chinese Astronauts Aloft
It's no secret that China aims to catch up to America and Russia in space, with plans to build a space station by 2020 and perhaps one day send people to the Moon. Last week, China sent three astronauts — two men and a woman — aboard a Shenzhou 10 capsule to a small, temporary space module called Tiangong-1, where they will spend 12 days conducting experiments and delivering lectures to Chinese students. China launched its first manned spaceflight in 2003; this was its fifth.
Coming Up
Astronomy
Studying the Sun
The Sun's lower atmosphere — which lies just above its surface, in a band 3,000 to 6,000 miles wide — is a place we don't know much about. Nonetheless, it plays an important role in determining the weather in space.
NASA's next scientific satellite, which goes by the acronym IRIS, aims to check out this "enigmatic" region (NASA's word), gathering information that could help scientists make more accurate predictions about solar wind and the like. Scheduled to launch on June 26 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the satellite will be the first to use an ultraviolet telescope to take high-resolution images every few seconds and provide, as NASA put it, "observations of areas as small as 150 miles across the sun."
But don't worry about IRIS flying too close and getting burned: It will do its job in orbit around the Earth, a safe 400 miles above us.
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