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POPSNaturmobil: Cart runs on "horse power" "My friends and relatives thought of me as a somewhat eccentric half-mad inventor attempting the impossible," said Mirhejazi who has brought his invention to Dubai. Nevertheless, one friend was prepared to rustle up enough cash to put the project under starter’s orders. "It took me 26 months to build the vehicle in my workshop in Tehran. I got it patented by a special department in Iran after professors at universities there attested that it was a scientific invention."
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POPSMysterious people who appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, UK, in the 12th century. The children were brother and sister and they had green colored skin. Their appearance was normal in all other areas. They spoke an unrecognized language and refused to eat anything other than pitch from bean pods. Eventually their skin lost its green color. When they learned English they explained that they were from the ‘Land of St Martin’ which was a dark place because the sun never rose far above the horizon. They claimed that they were tending their father’s herd and followed a river of light when they heard the sounds of bells - finding themselves in Woolpit.Some of the more unusual theories proposed for the origin of the children are that they were Hollow Earth children, parallel dimension children, or Extraterrestrial children.
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POPSCould Jupiter wreck the solar system?
"So what's the likelihood Mercury could crash into the Earth? If it did, the asteroid that most likely wiped out the dinosaurs will seem like a drop in the ocean compared with a planet 4880 km in diameter slamming into us. There will be very little left after this wrecking ball impact. But here's the kicker: There is only a 1% chance that these gravitational instabilities of the inner Solar System are likely to cause any kind of chaos before the Sun turns into a Red Giant and swallows Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in 7 billion years time. So, no need to look out for death-wish Mercury quite yet… there's a very low chance that any of this will happen. But some good news for Mars; the researchers have also found that if the chaos does ensue, the Red Planet may be flung out of the Solar System, possibly escaping our expanding Sun. So, let's get those Mars colonies started! Well, within the next few billions of years anyhow…" Good stuff for the next science-fiction movie :-)
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POPSMen aren't all from Mars Taken together, the findings provide a much more nuanced picture of men's sexuality than is promoted by men's magazines, Janssen pointed out. "There's huge variability among men in how easily they're turned on or turned off, how easily they experience sexual desire and arousal," he explained. "The differences among men and the differences among women are much larger than the average difference between the sexes in almost anything sexual."In fact, the researcher added, as many as 30 percent of women may be more easily sexually aroused than most men. "This study's challenging the idea that men are simple," he said.
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POPSThe man who invented Mars It is Lowell's vision of Mars that has enthralled and inspired earthlings ever since.In 1895, Lowell published a book about what he believed he saw.He became famous and immensely popular.Lowell was born at 131 Tremont Street in Boston on March 13,1855,into a family at the pinnacle of what passed for American aristocracy. The appearance of Lowell's book about Mars in 1895 came at a time of canal-building on earth. The Suez had recently been constructed; the Panama was in the works. For both Lowell and his adoring public, the prospect of canals on a neighboring planet was too captivating to dismiss. He published his second book about the Red Planet, Mars and Its Canals, in 1906.In 1908, he published his third and final book on the planet, Mars as the Abode of Life. Back at his observatory on Mars Hill, Lowell renewed his attention to another matter: the possibility of a ninth planet beyond Neptune, which he called "Planet X."
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POPSsmart kids vs popular kids Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better.But I think the main reason is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy. It's important for nerds to realize that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.<< Interesting read.Written by someone who was considered to be a "nerd" at school.
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POPSLife on the edge That throws up a tricky problem for engineers sending space craft to explore these alien worlds. What if the craft were to carry its own cargo of Earth microbes which set up home there?One major problem for any accidental interplanetary microbe would be how to survive the punishing radiation bombardment in space. Most would be rapidly frazzled en route. Most, but not all. Deinococcus radiodurans, nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium", is listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the "world's toughest bacterium". By rapidly replacing its DNA, it can survive cold, dehydration, vacuum, acid and a hefty radiation dose. Its Latin name means "terrifying berry that withstands radiation".
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POPSAnimal senses humans don't have You might think you're smart, but none of your senses rival the keenest abilities in the animal world. Animals see in the dark, sniff prey miles away, and detect electrical output from muscle twitches in hidden meals. Read on, so you don't become one of those meals.<<
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POPSMale menopause? Yes, it’s real Andropause is a medical condition, diagnosed with a blood test by a physician that reveals testosterone levels below a certain level. If a diagnosis of andropause is warranted, treatment with testosterone replacement may be an option, depending on a man’s health history. However, the biggest, and most misunderstood, symptom of declining testosterone is a decrease in libido. Testosterone is truly the hormone that stokes the flames of desire. Many men confuse andropause with erectile dysfunction (ED), because they often occur around the same time. These men often turn to an ED medication, such as Viagra, to improve their erectile ability, which works for a time in most cases. However, as men get older, the gap between desire and arousal widens and many men become deeply disappointed when Viagra doesn't give them the desire to have sex. That's because Viagra doesn't boost testosterone levels.<<
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POPSRaindrops on roses The team tried to replicate the effect.They put some polyvinyl alcohol onto rose petals and allowed it to set, then peeled off a thin plastic cast of the petal surface.This film had the same properties as the rose petal:the film could hold droplets of between 3-5 microlitres even when held upside down. It seems that the physical shape of the surface is much more important than any chemical properties of the material in creating 'stickiness',says Ronald Fearing, a biomimetic engineer at the University of California at Berkeley. For a rose, this stickiness might come in handy as reflective water drops that glisten in the Sun might attract pollinating insects. In the lab, such materials might be useful for 'lab on a chip' devices that need to hold and shunt around tiny quantities of liquid without leaking or being contaminated by nearby materials. "These findings present many interesting applications in microfluid handling," says Fearing.
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POPS"Mad, Bad and Sad" If male doctors conspired to define madness, responding to behaviors that flouted the social conventions of their culture, female patients, in the attempt to understand themselves and their context, and maybe even to create or bolster identity, colluded with those same doctors to satisfy the changing definitions of madness. “Often enough,” Appignanesi notes, “extreme expressions of the culture’s malaise, symptoms and disorders mirrored the time’s order.” While “Mad, Bad and Sad” echoes and enlarges upon Elaine Showalter’s book “The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980,” Showalter’s perspective is more exclusively feminist, arguing that psychiatry as practiced on women is a history of their subjugation and control by men. But as Appignanesi makes clear, women have had no little role in creating and fulfilling the definitions of their madness.<< "Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present" by Lisa Appignanesi.
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POPSSpam reaches 30 "It was the first really bad thing that people started doing on the internet, in terms of letting the small town rules break down and start abusing people."
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POPSPain as an art form Mr. Collen wrote to pain doctors around the world to solicit examples of art from pain patients. Working with San Francisco college student James Gregory, 21, who suffers from chronic pain as the result of a car accident, the two created the Pain Exhibit, an online gallery of art from pain sufferers. The images are evocative and troubling.“Some of them are painful even to look at,'’ Dr. Basbaum said. Finding ways to communicate pain is essential to patients who are suffering, many of whom don’t receive adequate treatment from doctors.Mr. Collen said the main goal of the exhibit is to raise awareness about the problem of chronic pain.“People don’t believe what they can’t see,'’ Mr. Collen said. “But they see a piece of art an individual created about their pain and everything changes.'’
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POPSCity road networks grow like biological systems "Beyond the economic, demographic and geographic "forces" that shape a town, there are a myriad of small "accidents" that contribute",says Marc Barthélemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Bruyères-le-Châtel."Although these are unpredictable, they can be understood in terms of statistics and simple modelling." The researchers will now study how road networks developed over time in old cities, such as London and Paris. They hope to unearth other possible universal features that might be present to refine their model.
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POPSStrange things happen at full moon On the moon's dayside this effect is counteracted somewhat by sunlight: Photons knock electrons back off the surface, lessening the negative charge. But on the night side, electrons accumulate and the charge can climb to thousands of volts. The extreme differences in charge might cause dust to fly from the negative night side to the less-negative day side, becoming strongest along the regions where the sun is rising or setting. Astronauts walking on the charged terrain might get electrified like sock from a hot dryer. "Touching another astronaut, a doorknob, a piece of sensitive electronics — any of these simple actions could produce an unwelcome zap."
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POPSYou Bet Your Tintype, Buckaroo Mr. Kendrick belongs to a growing group of commercial and art photographers who have retreated in recent years from the ease and exactitude of the digital age and taken up the difficult, ethereal techniques of early photography, including the ambrotype (in which a unique image is created on a glass plate), daguerreotype (on polished silver) and tintype (usually on tin-plated iron ). The pictures — made by exposing and developing the metal plates after they have been coated with a light-sensitive solution of silver nitrate — are a kind of ideal meeting of subject and style. Mr. Kendrick, like most cowboys, is much happier when doing things the hard way.“Making these kinds of pictures, you don’t need the mental skills that you have to have a Ph.D. for,” he said. “It’s more like learning to be a carpenter. It’s work and it’s satisfying. What you get is unique, not mass-produced. You can’t repeat the process. So it’s the antithesis of digital.”
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POPSYou walk wrong “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.”
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POPSact,build,eat,invent,learn,live,move Laky’s text treatment really seems to declare once and for all that the best solutions might literally be right in our own backyards and communities, with materials and practices that simply need to be re-examined and better utilized. As the artist openly states, “Natural materials are very expressive…they also connect me to nature which is a deep love of mine.” According to her artist website, Laky considers herself to be an environmentalist, with her work often employing materials harvested from nature and/or agricultural sources with select recycled elements incorporated. “She is attracted to humble materials and simple, direct methods of hand construction…Laky has (also) been a strong advocate for the establishment of an environmental sustainability curriculum in design and art at UC Davis.”
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POPSThe 7 habits of highly effective propagandists citing a qualified source is a good way to emphasize a legitimate idea. But you should consider whether or not the source being cited is really qualified to make judgments about a particular issue. 5. PLAIN FOLKS The “Plain Folks” technique is at work whenever a speaker promotes the idea that he or she is “of the people,” just an Average Joe despite the fact that he or she may go home to a mansion at the end of the day. 6. CARD STACKING “Stacking the deck” is a gimmick used by magicians where a deck of cards appears to be randomly shuffled but is in fact arranged in a specific way. The IPA borrowed the term to describe a technique where only one side of a topic is favored, or another side is ignored or played down. 7. BANDWAGON The idea behind the Bandwagon technique is that, since everyone else is doing it, so too should you.
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POPSHow big is too big? Mr Melling has even considered having his pride and joy airlifted out of his garden, and said he always knew he was going to face this problem."It's not as though I'm some idiot who got the measurements wrong and is now stuck with a boat he can't move," he said."I knew from the start that once the boat was finished I would face some problems getting it out of the garden." Bemused neighbours have only just realised Mr Melling has been building the massive, lightweight yacht in his garden.Strong winds several weeks ago blew off the polytunnel cover which had previously concealed the yacht from passers by.<< :lol:
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POPSEarth could seed Titan with life Dr Gladman's team calculated that up to 20 terrestrial rocks from a large impact on Earth would reach Titan. These would strike Titan's upper atmosphere at 10-15 km/s. At this velocity, the cruise down to the surface might be comfortable enough for microbes to survive the journey.But the news was more bleak for Europa. By contrast with the handful that hit Titan, about 100 terrestrial meteoroids hit the icy moon. "It's frustrating if you're a microbe that's been wandering the Universe for a million years to then die striking the surface of Europa," Dr Gladman mused.Asked after his presentation by one scientist whether he thought microbes would be able to survive Titan's freezing temperatures, Dr Gladman answered: "That's for you people to decide, I'm just the pizza delivery boy."
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POPSShyness Gene Teased Out If further research links RGS2 variations to anxiety disorders, the gene may make a good treatment target, Smoller's team writes in the Archives of General Psychiatry.<<
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POPSJoseph Campbell and the Hero * Woman as Temptress (the subsequent horror--woman now represents the flesh, which must be transcended) * At-one-ment with the Father, who is also "good" (merciful, provident) and "bad" (threatening, terrible)--initiation into the Father's office * Apotheosis--attainment of divine state beyond ignorance: transcendence of oppositions male/female and time/eternity * The Ultimate Boon--immortality (often depicted as inexhaustible matter, e.g., food and drink) = perfect illumination, transcendence of all being 3) Return: benefit to group/human race (selflessness) * Refusal of the Return--again, only a possibility: if the hero wants to remain in the ecstasy of illumination * The Magic Flight (if necessary--i.e., if there is opposition) * Rescue from Without (if necessary) * The Crossing of the Return Threshold--hero must "survive the impact of the world"
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POPSA Breeze of Eastern Epistemology:Knowing What Exists Here we stand in this proverbial and pre-verbal here-and-now, in the middle of Nothingness... This is all there is... And to ignore this "Now" would be the ignorance of un-awareness. To ignore what's outside of this "Now" would be the ignorance of bliss...
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POPSEvolution:24 myths and misconceptions It doesn't matter if people do not understand evolution "Survival of the fittest" justifies "everyone for themselves" Evolution is limitlessly creative Evolution cannot explain traits such as homosexuality Creationism provides a coherent alternative to evolution Creationist myths: Evolution must be wrong because the Bible is inerrant Accepting evolution undermines morality Evolutionary theory leads to racism and genocide Religion and evolution are incompatible Half a wing is no use to anyone Evolutionary science is not predictive Evolution cannot be disproved so is not science Evolution is just so unlikely to produce complex life forms Evolution is an entirely random process Mutations can only destroy information, not create it Darwin is the ultimate authority on evolution The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex Yet more creationist misconceptions Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics
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