Archive for August 12th, 2012
Curiosity Sends High-Resolution Color Images from Mars’ Gale Crater
August 12th, 2012 | 
Author: NASA's Curiosity rover has shipped back to Earth high-resolution color images of its surroundings on Mars, sharpening our views of an intriguing channel, layered buttes and a layer of cobbles and pebbles embedded in a finer matrix of material. The images show a landscape closely resembling portions of the southwestern United States, adding to the impression gained from the lower-resolution thumbnail images released earlier this week.
Exposed by Rocket Engine Blasts
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Smoking in movies influences teens (always has)
Movies may be clouding kids' perceptions about smoking — the more they watch smoking in the movies, the more they try smoking, U.S. researchers say.
Sunday Morning Movie
Rocketship X-M
Astronauts (Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, John Emery, Noah Beery, Jr., & Hugh O'Brien) blast off to explore the moon, but because of a malfunction, they end up on Mars instead, where they discover a ruined city of a past civilization.
Stressed-out men prefer a fleshier woman
There may be a love story at the intersection of the nation's battered economy and a steady rise in its obesity rates: Compared with men without a care in the world, men who are stressed out are more likely to find a rounder, plumper woman more attractive.
Men under stress not only rated the attractiveness of heavier women more positively, they found women appealing across a wider size spectrum than did men who were not stressed, says a new study published by the open-access journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) One.
Those findings are in line with long-standing evolutionary theories of how humans define beauty ideals in the opposite sex. Whether it's a man's square chin or the curve of a woman's waist, physical traits that project good health, maximum fertility and access to food and shelter promise the interested party the prospect of a good mate for carrying forth one's genes, and are thus more attractive.
Iron, faulty gene cause bowel cancer
Colon cancer was two to three times more likely to develop in mice with a faulty APC gene and fed high amounts of iron, researchers in Britain and Scotland say … The study might also explain why foods such as red meat, which have high levels of iron, are linked to an increased risk of bowel cancer.
Are tyrants good for art?
Culture thrives on conflict and antagonism, not social harmony – a point made rather memorably by a certain Harry Lime, says philosopher John Gray.
"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
When Orson Welles spoke these lines as Harry Lime, the charismatic villain at the heart of the film The Third Man, released in 1949, Welles can't have realised how they would resonate ever after. Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay, credited the lines to Welles, and it seems clear the actor added them when some extra dialogue was needed while the film was being shot.
Scientist Discovers Plate Tectonics On Mars
For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth. Now, a UCLA scientist has discovered that the geological phenomenon, which involves the movement of huge crustal plates beneath a planet's surface, also exists on Mars.