Is The Earth Beautiful? Take a Look and See for Yourself: Images of the Earth from NASA Satellites

How do you define beauty? Which of your senses do you employ to determine whether an object is beautiful or not? Beauty they say is in the eye of the beholder. From that statement, we can imply that our eyes are needed to tell if a thing is beautiful or not.  

Many of us claim that the earth is beautiful but how many of us have in the true sense of the word 'seen' the earth? We may not all have the opportunity to travel into space and look gaze upon the earth to answer that question, but there is now opportunity to view the earth in pictures, thanks to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

NASA has released a 158-page free eBook called “Earth as Art” in which the agency presents images of our planet taken by various NASA satellites since 1960. It covers satellite pictures from around the world.

The book features images from the different continents. Take note however that the satellites can measure outside the visible range of light, so these images show more than what is visible to the naked eye.

Take a look at planet earth and see for yourself how beautiful she is. Download  “Earth as Art” free eBook version (pdf) 

 

 

Can You Eat 60 Day Old Bread?

It is said to be the best thing after sliced bread. It’s bread that can last for 60 days. An American company called Microzap says it has developed a technique that will keep bread mould free for two months. Under normal circumstances, bread will go mouldy around 10 days, but the Texas-based company, uses a special microwave that kills the mold spores in your bread in 10 seconds. Now that bread that goes bad in 10 days will last for about 60 mold-free days.

The bread is zapped in a sophisticated microwave array which kills the spores that cause the problem. The equipment was originally developed to kill organisms like multi-resistant staph bacteria and salmonella. But its developers realized it also kills bread mold in about a 10-second zap. It works much like a home microwave, but the waves are produced in various frequencies, which allows for uniform heating.
The company claims it could significantly reduce the amount of wasted bread and the technique can also be used with a wide range of foods including fresh turkey and many fruits and vegetables.
One of the biggest threats to bread is mould. As loaves are usually wrapped in plastic, any water in the bread that evaporates from within is trapped and makes the surface moist. This provides excellent growing conditions for Rhizopus stolonifer, the fungus that leads to mould.
The technology could also impact bread in other ways. Bread manufacturers add lots of preservatives to try and fight mould, but then add extra chemicals to mask the taste of the preservatives. If bakers were able to use the microwave technology, they would be able to avoid these additives.
The company's device has attracted plenty of interest from bread manufacturers - but it is worried that it could push up costs. And there is also a concern that consumers might not take to bread that lasts for so long.

Extended Sleep Increases Alertness and Reduces Pain Sensitivity

Lots of research has been carried out concerning sleep and more is still being done. The various results we’ve had always point to the fact that adequate sleep is essential for us to live a healthy life. We know of the importance of sleep when it comes to learning and memory: sleep helps the brain commit new information to memory. People who’d slept after learning a task did better on tests later. Sleep deprivation may cause weight gain by affecting the way our bodies process and store carbohydrates. We know that the troubles of not having adequate sleep can affect our safety, mood and increase our susceptibility to diseases.

A new study however, has brought a new dimension to the sleep and healthiness issue by observing for the first time the relationship between amount of night-time sleep to daytime alertness and pain sensitivity. The study suggests that extending nightly sleep in mildly sleepy, healthy adults increases daytime alertness and reduces pain sensitivity. The research suggests how important it is for people with chronic pain conditions and even those going for a surgical operation to have adequate sleep.

The study, appearing in the December issue of the journal SLEEP, involved 18 healthy, pain-free, sleepy volunteers. They were randomly assigned to four nights of either maintaining their habitual sleep time or extending their sleep time by spending 10 hours in bed per night. Objective daytime sleepiness was measured using the multiple sleep latency test (MSLT), and pain sensitivity was assessed using a radiant heat stimulus.

Results show that the extended sleep group slept 1.8 hours more per night than the habitual sleep group. This nightly increase in sleep time during the four experimental nights was correlated with increased daytime alertness, which was associated with less pain sensitivity.
In the extended sleep group, the length of time before participants removed their finger from a radiant heat source increased by 25 percent, reflecting a reduction in pain sensitivity. The authors report that the magnitude of this increase in finger withdrawal latency is greater than the effect found in a previous study of 60 mg of codeine.

The results, combined with data from previous research, suggest that increased pain sensitivity in sleepy individuals is the result of their underlying sleepiness.

10 Things You Could Do Before You Were Born

It takes about 38 weeks for a fertilized egg to develop into a full term baby. When does the learning process begin for an individual? Is it before or after birth? There is plenty of evidence today telling us that this process of learning begins even while we were still fetuses. Some of the behavior we picked up from the womb can even last a life time.

1) Movements: you probably made your first movements around 8 weeks into gestation although your mum may not have felt you moving until about 16-20 weeks of the pregnancy. Ultrasound technology enables us to clearly observe the fetus in the womb. Some of us even sucked our thumb as children but one thing we may not know is that we probably started doing this as a fetus because a fetus can suck his/her thumbs from 20 weeks.
2) Handedness: Common patterns of behavior seen in adults are also seen in the fetus – e.g. handedness. You chose your more active hand to use while you were still in the womb. It’s been observed that fetuses that suck their right thumb rather than their left thumb are likely to be right handed children.

3) Breathing: Well, you weren’t actually breathing while you were still a fetus but you learnt the process and technique of breathing then. A fetus does not actually breathe in the womb. The mother breathes for the fetus, and essential oxygen is passed to the fetus through the umbilical cord but around 9 weeks of pregnancy, a fetus begins to make breathing-like movements. This means that when the baby is born, he/she will be able to breathe straight away.
4) Eye Movements: Your eyes started moving around the 14^th week of pregnancy and complex movements, similar to your eye movements now will have presented by the 24th week. In the last trimester of pregnancy, a fetus begins to have rapid eye movements.
5) Dreaming: the most reliable evidence that a person can dream is from a self-report and of course nobody could have asked you as a fetus if you could dream. So the issue of when an individual begins to dream is still a debate. However, fetus begins to have rapid eye movement (REM) sleep from as early as the 23 rd week of gestation. Typically, the REM sleep often indicates when a person is dreaming. Even though REM sleep has been detected in fetuses, scientists cannot know for certain if a fetus can dream because humans can still dream outside of the REM sleep stage.
6) Recognizing Sounds: As a newborn, it was possible for you to recognize music that you heard in the womb. The fetus begins to respond to sounds at about 20 weeks into the pregnancy. To begin with the fetus only hears low noises, but as development continues he/she starts to hear higher pitched noises too. Louder sounds can make the fetus startle and move about. The older fetus is able to discriminate between different voices and languages.
7) Urinating, Drinking and Tasting: You started emptying your bladder while still a fetus during the 10th week of pregnancy. Urine is passed straight into the amniotic fluid, the protective fluid surrounding the fetus in the womb. About five weeks later, the fetus starts to drink this same fluid. And as a fetus, you liked certain tastes more than others, and will drink more amniotic fluid if it tastes sweet.
8) Feeling Pain: Perhaps we may have wondered when it was exactly that we became aware of ourselves or started becoming conscious of signals coming from the outside world. We know with each other when someone feels pain because we can ask them and they can tell us. We cannot do this with the fetus, so we have to study when the brain develops enough to make this possible, and make an informed guess. If you touch the foot of a fetus at 12 weeks, he/she will move away, but it is extremely unlikely that the fetus is ‘feeling’ anything. This is just a reflex response like a knee jerk. From 26 weeks onwards it does seem likely that the fetus can hear sounds and feel pain too because the connection between the brain and the body which is a prerequisite for conscious experience will have been formed and functional.
9) Stress: At times we feel stressed or anxious maybe while playing a computer game or watching an action movie and this may even cause our hearts to beat faster. Such a response is also elicited by fetuses when the mother is stressed or anxious.
10) Yawning: Yawning is quite contagious and by reading this, you may even be triggered to yawn. But yawning even though contagious is something we begin to do before we are born. While some researchers have suggested that fetuses yawn, others have disagreed and claim it is simple mouth opening. But a new research has clearly distinguished 'yawning' from 'non-yawn mouth opening' based on the duration of mouth opening.

Your Left Side is the Best Side When Posing for a Picture

Some of us run for cover whenever a camera is pointed at us. Are you one of those who dislike having your picture taken because you always seem to come out hideous? You may even feel jealous of your friend who always comes out flawless in photos.  Being photogenic comes naturally to some of us. Whether you come out good in a picture or not, there is something that can help you appear better. The next time you are posing for a picture, make sure your left cheek is facing the camera.

The reason for this suggestion is simple. Your left side is perceived as your best side. Your best side may be your left cheek, according to a study by Kelsey Blackburn and James Schirillo from Wake Forest University in the US. Their work shows that images of the left side of the face are perceived and rated as more pleasant than pictures of the right side of the face, possibly due to the fact that we present a greater intensity of emotion on the left side of our face.

Others can judge human emotions in large part from the expressions on our face. Our highly specialized facial muscles are capable of expressing many unique emotions. Research suggests that the left side of the face is more intense and active during emotional expression.

Blackburn and Schirillo investigated whether there are differences in the perception of the left and right sides of the face in real-life photographs of individuals.

The researchers explained that posers' left cheeks tend to exhibit a greater intensity of emotion, which observers find more aesthetically pleasing.

Participants were asked to rate the pleasantness of both sides of male and female faces on gray-scale photographs. The researchers presented both original photographs and mirror-reversed images, so that an original right-cheek image appeared to be a left-cheek image and vice versa.

They found a strong preference for left-sided portraits, regardless of whether the pictures were originally taken of the left side, or mirror-reversed. The left side of the face was rated as more aesthetically pleasing for both male and female posers.

These aesthetic preferences were also confirmed by measurements of pupil size, a reliable unconscious measurement of interest. Our pupils usually dilate in response to more interesting stimuli – here more pleasant-looking faces, and constrict when looking at unpleasant images. In the experiment, pupil size increased with pleasantness ratings.

Cars Can Now Drive Themselves!

Imagine a situation where all you need to do is simply get into your car, lean back, with your hands off the steering wheel, and your feet off the pedals, you relax and just choose a destination. Your car, now in charge does the rest of the job of taking you to your destination without your supervision or control. And you could actually use the time just like commuters on public transport to do some work or maybe read a newspaper.

This was only possible in futuristic sci-fi films like the 2004 I, Robot where driverless cars were seen driving on highways, and many other older movies that featured autonomous cars. Well that idea no longer lives in the movies as driverless cars are fast becoming a reality. This is similar to some other sci-fi or fantasy concepts which later became scientific reality. In the 1997 American action thriller Face Off, we saw a full face transplant taking place, but it was not until 2005 that the first partial face transplant on a living human was carried out in France and the first full face transplant was completed in Spain in 2010.

Autonomous cars known as driverless or self-driving cars can fulfill the human transportation capabilities of traditional cars. The cars use a combination of technologies, including radar sensors on the front, video cameras aimed at the surrounding areas, various other sensors and artificial-intelligence software that helps steer. At the moment, self-driving cars look much like every other car already on the road, with a computer taking the place of the human brain. It is hoped that self-driving cars will be able to drive on public streets in the near future

There have been several programs around the world on driverless cars. The idea had initially faced legal hurdles but not anymore as politicians are now scrambling to make self-driving cars a reality. Three U.S states have now passed laws permitting driverless cars. California is the latest state to allow testing of self driving cars on the roads, though only with a human passenger along as a safety measure, the other two states being Nevada and Florida.

It is believed that the introduction of autonomous cars could produce several benefits. In a world where an estimated 1.2 million people die every year in road accidents due to human error, autonomous cars could reduce the number of traffic accidents on the road as self-driving cars will be safer than human-driven cars. This is due to the autonomous system’s increased reliability and decreased reaction time compared to human drivers.

There is also relief of vehicle occupants from driving and navigation chores. Then there is the issue of the occupant’s state. It could ferry around people who are unable to drive due to certain disabilities such as the blind, people who are too young and some others too old to drive. You won’t be needing driver’s license anymore. It would not also matter if the occupants were intoxicated. Cars can park far away where space is not scarce and return as needed to pick up passengers thereby alleviating parking space scarcity.

Google seems to be the most visible company working on these types of vehicles, but similar projects are under way at other organizations, including Caltech. So far, the Google driverless cars have racked up more than 300,000 driving miles, and 50,000 of those miles were without any intervention from the human drivers.

Of course there has been lots of concern coming from people about such cars. Many still believe that computers cannot be smart enough to maneuver the car in cases of emergency say when a cyclist or a child mistakenly runs into the road. Some also fear that the computer system can malfunction.

There is also the question of driver’s liability in case of an accident. What if a driverless car has an accident on the way? Who will be held responsible: the owner who by the way is not operating it or the manufacturer?

At a time when unemployment rate is on the increase globally, many fear that driverless cars will lead to the loss of a profession – driving.