Jason Gilbert

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!

It’s an unmanned drone helicopter shooting a taco from space down at you and your colleagues during lunchtime!

The Internet is going wild for Tacocopter, perhaps the next great startup out of Silicon Valley, which boasts a business plan that combines four of the most prominent touchstones of modern America: tacos, helicopters, robots and laziness.

Indeed, the concept behind Tacocopter is very simple, and very American: You order tacos on your smartphone and also beam in your GPS location information. Your order — and your location — are transmitted to an unmanned drone helicopter (grounded, near the kitchen where the tacos are made), and the tacocopter is then sent out with your food to find you and deliver your tacos to wherever you’re standing.

You pay online, so the tacos are simply dropped off at your feet by the drone helicopter, which then flies back to the restaurant to pick up its next order.

Read the rest here.

“US researchers have found oddly-shaped blood cells in heart attack patients, indicating that a blood test could help predict whether a patient is at risk of an imminent cardiac emergency.

The study by the Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) found that the endothelial blood cells from heart attack patients are abnormally large and misshapen, sometimes appearing with multiple nuclei.

That could make them reliable indicators of an impending heart attack, according to the study published this week in Science Translational Medicine….”

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By Dylan Stableford | The Sideshow – 12 hrs ago

Researchers at the Univ. of Pennsylvania say they have identified the scalp chemical that stops hair from growing, and believe it may finally—finally!—lead to the elusive cure for male pattern baldness.

The scientists found that a protein called PDG2 was three times as prevalent on the scalps of balding men. (PDG2-blocking drugs are already being tested by researchers working on alternative treatments for asthma, so they’re hopeful testing for baldness can be expedited.)

The news was met with joy in England, where an estimated 7.4 million men are bald or balding.

“Excitingly,” the Daily Mail reported, “drugs that block the protein have already been developed for other purposes, meaning a hair restoring lotion or potion could be on the market in under five years.”

Read the rest here.

If men could do this, I don’t think obesity in men would be a problem…

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Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor

Women may not need a guy, a vibrator, or any other direct sexual stimulation to have an orgasm, finds a new study on exercise-induced orgasms and sexual pleasure.

The findings add qualitative and quantitative data to a field that has been largely unstudied, according to researcher Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. For instance, Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues first reported the phenomenon in 1953, saying that about 5 percent of women they had interviewed mentioned orgasm linked to physical exercise. However, they couldn’t know the actual prevalence because most of these women volunteered the information without being directly asked.

Since then, reports of so-called “coregasms,” named because of their seeming link to exercises for core abdominal muscles, have circulated in the media for years, according to the researchers.

“Despite attention in the popular media, little is known scientifically about exercise-induced orgasms,” the researchers write in a special issue of the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy released in print this month.

Pleasure at the gym

Herbenick and her colleagues used online surveys to gather their data, which included answers from 124 women who had experienced exercise-induced orgasms and 246 women who reported exercise-induced sexual pleasure. Most of the women, ages 18 to 63 and an average age of 30, were in a relationship or married and 69 percent said they were heterosexual.

The researchers found that about 40 percent of both groups of women had experienced exercise-induced pleasure or orgasm on more than 11 occasions in their lives. Most of the women in the “orgasm” group said they felt some level of embarrassment when exercising in public places.

The “orgasm” group mostly said during the experiences they weren’t having a sexual fantasy or thinking about someone they were attracted to.

Of the women who had orgasms during exercise, about 45 percent said their first experience was linked to abdominal exercises; 19 percent linked to biking/spinning; 9.3 percent linked to climbing poles or ropes; 7 percent reported a connection with weight lifting; 7 percent running;  the rest of the experiences included various exercises, such as yoga, swimming, elliptical machines, aerobics and others. Exercise-induced sexual pleasure was linked with more types of exercises than the orgasm phenomenon.

Abdominal exercises may be best

Answers to open-ended questions in the survey revealed some interesting details, the researchers found. For instance, the abdominal exercises tied to orgasms seemed to be particularly associated with the exercise in which a person supports their weight on their forearms on a so-called captain’s chair with padded arm rests and then lifts their knees toward their chest.

The open-ended questions also revealed the orgasms tended to occur after multiple sets of crunches or some other abdominal exercise rather than after just a couple repetitions; they also seemed to happen after the woman had really exerted herself.

“Many of these women talked about it happening even as children,” Herbenick said during a telephone interview, adding that some indicated an experience at age 7 or 8.

“We had at least one woman in the study who was a virgin, and she really loved that she could have these experiences at the gym,” Herbenick said.

The researchers aren’t sure why certain exercises lead to orgasm or sexual pleasure, though Herbenick hopes to tease out the trigger in ongoing research.

“It may be that exercise, which is already known to have significant benefits to health and well-being, has the potential to enhance women’s sexual lives as well,” Herbenick said, adding that it isn’t clear whether these exercises could actually enhance women’s sexual experiences.

Read the rest here.

Who & what  killed the bees ?

Read a great review of this relatively new performance ratio, via ETF Prophet.

Cap and trade programs to reduce emissions do not inherently provide incentives to induce the private sector to develop innovative technologies to address climate change, according to a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Why have the financial markets recently rallied so sharply in places such as America? If you ask a trader, they will cite “rational” explanations, such as US bank stress tests, an improved US economic outlook, and decline in eurozone concerns. But if you ask John Coates, formerly a senior trader at Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs, there may be another factor at work: hormones.

Since he left banking, Mr Coates has retrained as a neuroscientist at Cambridge university, where he has worked in a team analysing the bioscience of financial traders. And, as a forthcoming book will explain, Mr Coates and his fellow researchers now believe that unseen fluctuations in traders’ hormone levels play a crucial, but widely overlooked, role in finance; so much so in fact, that he wants regulators and bank managers to start tracking these hormone levels, as a matter of public policy.

Read the rest here.

I’ll say it again; FUCK THIS COMPANY

A new fossil has scientist asking if a new species of human has been discovered…..

By 2030!

Full article

Horseshit.

It is clear from looking at the current landscape that volatility is rapidly becoming a key focus for asset management. Witness the birth of “low-volatility” ETFs and the popularity of minimum-variance portfolios borne from empirical studies that demonstrate their superior performance to alternative methodologies.  It seems obvious from the research that volatility is an important factor to consider in portfolio management, but it is neccessary to understand why this is the case.

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No wonder there is so much violence int he fast food places….

Here is my Spectator cover story on wind power:

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.

This forces a decision from Cameron — will he reassure the turbine magnates that he plans to keep subsidising wind energy, or will he retreat? The political wind has certainly changed direction. George Osborne is dead set against wind farms, because it has become all too clear to him how much they cost. The Chancellor’s team quietly encouraged MPs to sign a letter to No. 10 a few weeks ago saying that ‘in these financially straitened times, we think it is unwise to make consumers pay, through taxpayer subsidy, for inefficient and intermittent energy production that typifies onshore wind turbines’.

Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me — the taxpayers — double. I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.

In Britain the percentage of total energy that comes from wind is only 0.6 per cent. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, ‘policies intended to meet the EU Renewables Directive in 2020 will impose extra consumer costs of approximately £15 billion per annum’ or £670 per household. It is difficult to see what value will be got for this money. The total carbon emissions saved by the great wind rush is probably below 1 per cent, because of the need to keep fossil fuels burning as back-up when the wind does not blow. It may even be a negative number.

America is having far better luck. Carbon emissions in the United States fell by 7 per cent in 2009, according to a Harvard study. But the study concluded that this owes less to the recession that year than the falling price of natural gas — caused by the shale gas revolution. (Burning gas emits less than half as much carbon dioxide as coal for the same energy output.) The gas price has fallen even further since, making coal seem increasingly pricey by comparison. All over America, from Utah to West Virginia, coal mines are being closed and coal plants idled or cancelled. (The US Energy Information Administration calculates that every $4 spent on shale purchases the same energy as $25 spent on oil: at this rate, more and more vehicles will switch to gas.)

So even if you accept the most alarming predictions of climate change, those turbines that have ruined your favourite view are doing nothing to help. The shale gas revolution has not only shamed the wind industry by showing how to decarbonise for real, but has blown away its last feeble argument — that diminishing supplies of fossil fuels will cause their prices to rise so high that wind eventually becomes competitive even without a subsidy. Even if oil stays dear, cheap gas is now likely to last many decades.

Read the rest here.

Humans are the most unique animals on the planet. Because of our ability to effectively communicate, opposable thumbs, and other traits.

No other species can compare to a human’s ability to run long distances. Our two legs allow us to run long distances without excreting large amounts of energy. Humans are truly amazing unique animals, and our abilities to continue expand our span of thought show that we are capable of many more great things. I can’t imagine where the human race will be 30 years from now, but I can assure you that it will be an amazing life as we experience it.

Solar storms have also been linked to major wars and societal upheaval; not a good thing that we are entering s 10 year period of over activity….

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

Dwight Schrute would be jealous: A new study suggests that women can detect snakes faster during the premenstrual phase of their menstrual cycles.

The quirky character on the sitcom “The Office” has plenty of theories about both snakes and menstruation, including a color-coded chart for the cycles of his female co-workers, but even he didn’t see this one coming. Study researchers say the idea makes sense, as fluctuating hormones can influence the amygdala, a brain region responsible for fear and anxiety.

During the luteal phase, or premenstrual portion, of the menstrual cycle, women are quicker at detecting photos of snakes, a threatening stimulus, than they are during the early and late follicular phase of the cycle, when the ovaries prepare to release an egg.

The luteal cycle begins with ovulation, the time of maximum fertility, suggesting that heightened anxiety might be adaptive in helping pregnant or potentially pregnant women stay safe, researchers report today (March 8) in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. The luteal phase is also the time when some women experience premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, an array of symptoms that can include everything from breast tenderness to irritability to anxiety.

The study is preliminary, and women’s cycles were calculated based on the dates participants gave for their last periods, not on direct hormone measurements, meaning further research is necessary to confirm the results.

In the study, Kyoto University Primate Institute researcher Nobuo Masataka and his colleague, Masahiro Shibasaki, asked 60 healthy, naturally cycling women ages 29 to 30 to look at grids of nine photos and to touch the photo in each grid that contained a snake. The other photos were of flowers, a neutral, non-scary image. In general, people are quicker to react to scary snakes than they are to pleasant flowers. [7 Shocking Snake Stories]

Each woman completed the experiment twice over two to three months. Twenty women participated during the early follicular phase of their cycle, or the fifth day after the start of the menstrual period, and during the late follicular phase, or the 25th day of the cycle right before ovulation.

Another 20 participated during the early follicular phase and the luteal phase, day 13 of the cycle right around when ovulation occurs. A third group of 20 participated during the late follicular phase and the luteal phase.

The results revealed that women detected flowers equally as well throughout their cycles. But they were quicker to see snakes during the luteal phase compared with the late follicular and early follicular phases. On average it took about 1,128 to 1149 milliseconds to spot the snake during the luteal phase, which was about 200 milliseconds faster than the average snake-spotting speed during the follicular phases.

There was no difference in snake-detecting ability between the early and late follicular phases.

Citing other hormonal studies, the researchers speculate that heightened levels of the hormone progesterone could increase anxiety. This hormone is particularly high in the luteal phase of the cycle. Other hormones, including estradiol and cortisol, also vary with the menstrual cycle and could play a role in this increased awareness of danger, the researchers wrote.

Source

via AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The largest solar storm in five years is racing toward Earth, threatening to unleash a torrent of charged particles that could disrupt power grids, GPS and airplane flights.

The sun erupted Tuesday evening, and the effects should start smacking Earth between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. EST Thursday (0600 GMT and 1000 GMT), according to forecasters at the U.S. government’s Space Weather Prediction Center. They say the storm, which started with a massive solar flare, is growing as it speeds outward from the sun.

“It’s hitting us right in the nose,” said Joe Kunches, a scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He called it the sun’s version of “Super Tuesday.”

Scientists say the sun has been relatively quiet for some time. And this storm, while strong, may seem fiercer because Earth has been lulled by several years of weak solar activity.

“This is a good-size event, but not the extreme type,” said Bill Murtagh, program coordinator for the space weather center.

The solar storm is likely to last through Friday morning, but the region that erupted can still send more blasts our way, Kunches said. He said another set of active sunspots is ready to aim at Earth right after this.

But for now, scientists are waiting to see what happens Thursday when the charged particles hit Earth at 4 million mph (6.4 million kph).

NASA solar physicist Alex Young added, “It could give us a bit of a jolt.” But he said this is far from a super solar storm.

The storm is coming after an earlier and weaker solar eruption happened Sunday, Kunches said. The latest blast of particles will probably arrive slightly later than forecasters first thought.

That means for North America the “good” part of a solar storm — the one that creates more noticeable auroras or Northern Lights — will peak Thursday evening. Auroras could dip as far south as the Great Lakes states or lower, Kunches said, but a full moon will make them harder to see.

Auroras are “probably the treat we get when the sun erupts,” Kunches said.

But there is potential for widespread problems. Solar storms have three ways they can disrupt technology on Earth: with magnetic, radio and radiation emissions. This is an unusual situation when all three types of solar storm disruptions are likely to be strong, Kunches said.

That means “a whole host of things” could follow, he said.

The magnetic part of the storm has the potential to trip electrical power grids. Kunches said utility companies around the world have been alerted. The timing and speed of the storm determines whether it knocks off power grids, he said.

In 1989, a strong solar storm knocked out the power grid in Quebec, causing 6 million people to lose power.

Solar storms can also make global positioning systems less accurate, which is mostly a problem for precision drilling and other technologies, Kunches said. There also could be GPS outages.

The storm also can cause communication problems and added radiation around the north and south poles, which will probably force airlines to reroute flights. Some already have done so, Kunches said.

Satellites could be affected, too. NASA spokesman Rob Navias said the space agency isn’t taking any extra precautions to protect astronauts on the International Space Station from added radiation.

“(Reuters) – Scientists said they have gotten even closer to proving the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that supplies mass to matter and would complete Albert Einstein’s theory of the universe.

Analyzing data from some 500 trillion sub-atomic particle collisions designed to emulate conditions right after the Big Bang when the universe was formed, scientists at Fermilab outside Chicago produced some 1,000 Higgs particles over a decade of work.

“Unfortunately, this hint is not significant enough to conclude that the Higgs boson exists,” said Rob Roser, a physicist at Fermilab, near Chicago, in explaining the findings being presented on Wednesday at a conference in La Thuille, Italy.

The image scientists have of the short-lived Higgs particles, which almost immediately decay into other particles, is still slightly “fuzzy,” Roser said.

The probability that what physicists detected is not a Higgs boson and is instead a statistical fluke was 1 in 250, which is near the threshold of 1 in 740 that physics has set to establish proof of a sub-atomic particle’s existence.

The hunt for the Higgs boson is significant because it would show the existence of an invisible field thought to permeate the entire universe. The Higgs field was posited in the 1960s by British scientist Peter Higgs as the way that matter obtained mass after the universe was created during the Big Bang.

According to the theory, it was the agent that made the stars, planets and life possible by giving mass to most elementary particles. Some gave it the nickname the “God particle.”

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