Shuttle Endeavour (STS-130) launches on Feb 8, 2010. Image credit: NASA/Ben Cooper

It’s been a long time since I changed out my desktop background and this picture was too good to pass up.

A quick shuttle update, experts on the ground are going over images of the shuttle looking for damage.  So far as far as

I’ve heard things look good.  Currently the shuttle is chasing down the ISS and should catch up Wednesday just after midnight.

There will be further inspections at that time as there always is, but like I said, things look good.

This is the next to the last scheduled flight of Endeavour.  The final flight is scheduled for July 29, 2010 as STS-134 and that flight will be the next to the last scheduled shuttle flight ever.  After that, well I’m not going there.

Grab a desktop below if you are so inclined (you can also get standard sizes at the NASA site).

You would think this bit of news would be coming out of Paris, but Britain has moved a step ahead of the French sartorially by giving their hospital gowns a designer makeover.

No more shifty, drafty paper gowns with bits of anatomy barely covered (there’s another reason why it’s called the I.C.U.); the new gown design aims to retain patients’ modesty and make their hospital stays a little less revealing.

The Design Council of Britain is all set to unveil the new designer gowns made by Ben de Lisi, who has dressed the likes of Kate Winslet. The new gowns are part of a project to improve dignity across the National Health Service.

Ben de Lisi told the BBC comfort was top of his mind when he designed the outfits.

“The old hospital gown was hideous, embarrassing, ill-fitting and probably ill-making too. You are away from home, ill, and in hospital and you have to wear this horrific garment with your arse hanging out. Give me a break. I wanted the new gowns to feel fabulous and aspirational.” De Lisi’s NHS collection, in his signature printed fabric, also includes pajama bottoms, nightwear and slippers.

Unlike many designer clothes, these gowns are a clever mix of functional and practical, says de Lisi–they allow patients to retain their modesty, but also give doctors access to the patient’s body via convenient “entrance points” in the gown. De Lisi stresses that these gowns do not tie in the back, to avoid the aforementioned arse issue.

However, the hospital gowns won’t be introduced to NHS facilities till 2011, which means patients who want hospital haute couture will have to wait a bit.

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Image: Ben de Lisi

Steve Newton of the wonderful National Center for Science Education has written another article promoting science in the Huffington Post, this time about asteroid impacts. And special bonus; he gives your loyal host here a shout-out.

Specifically, he mentions that I have said that the Hale-Bopp comet was larger than what wiped out the dinosaurs. It’s true: the object that created the Chicxulub crater off the coast of the Yucatan was something like 10 km (6 miles) across. The nucleus of Hale-Bopp was roughly 60 km (36 miles) across, meaning it would have had something like 100 times the mass of the dinosaur killer. I have vivid nightmares about asteroid impacts, and one 100x the size of the K-T extinction event is beyond scary.

Right now we lack the capability to stop such a comet impact; Hale-Bopp was discovered less than two years before it sailed by the Earth. It missed us by a huge margin, but had it been aimed at us things would look a lot different around here right now. We may be years away from being able to stop such an event, but as I’ve written before, people like Rusty Schweikart and Dan Durda are seriously considering what we can do, and have even started the B612 Foundation to look into it.

If we’re serious about such threats, were just a few years away from being able to prevent them. Given that statistically big impacts are very rare and only happen every few hundred thousand years or so, I’m rather liking where we stand right now. But that’s if we actually do something now. We need to start working on mitigation techniques, and rockets to carry them. I’m glad the B612 Foundation is working on it.

Related articles: A Pro-science article on HuffPo?

The great French biologist Jacques Monod would have turned 100 today. I am personally fond of him for having said, “What is true for E. coli is true for the elephant,” but he did much more than coin lovely phrases about microbes. His work on how genes switch on and off earned him a Nobel in 1965, and he also gave deep thought to the philosophy of biology, seeing it as the interplay of chance and necessity. Here’s a blog post from Larry Moran with more, and here’s Monod’s 1971 book, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

[Thanks to Jim Hu for pointing out this auspicious day!]

Sure, Botox can banish crows feet, smooth those wrinkles, and lift those frown lines, making the client look more youthful–and somewhat expressionless. But the treatment may have effects that are more than skin deep. A new study suggests that by paralyzing the frown muscles that ordinarily are engaged when we feel angry, Botox short-circuits the emotion itself [Newsweek]. 

In the now-common cosmetic treatment, a doctor injects botulinum toxin, sold under the brand name Botox, under the skin. The toxin kicks in, temporarily paralyzing facial muscles, smoothing skin out, and making a person look less wrinkly as a result. That paralysis, however, seems to interfere with a known feedback loop, in which smiling adds to your happiness and frowning multiplies your sadness [LiveScience]. And tamping down a person’s emotions seems to interfere with the ability to read emotions in others. Says study leader David Havas: “Botox [also] induces a kind of mild, temporary cognitive blindness to information in the world, social information about the emotions of other people” [Discovery News].

Havas studied 40 first-time Botox patients before and after their treatments, and both times had them read happy, sad, or angry statements. They then had to push a button, indicating they had understood what emotion the text elicited. The results showed that the patients who had undergone the treatment still understood happy sentences as quickly as they had before; but when it came to angry or sad sentences, they took a little bit more time to comprehend the emotion. Psychologist Arthur Glenberg explained, “Normally, the brain would be sending signals to the periphery to frown, and the extent of the frown would be sent back to the brain. But here, that loop is disrupted, and the intensity of the emotion and of our ability to understand it when embodied in language is disrupted” [Newsweek].

Even though the delay was less than a second, the researchers say that could be long enough to prevent you from picking up subtle emotional cues when you’re talking to a person. As Glenberg said, “If you are slightly slower reacting as I tell you about something that made me really angry, that could signal to me that you did not pick up my message” [Newsweek].

The findings were discussed at the recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the study will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science.

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Image: iStockphoto

How much time and energy is wasted as drivers circle around blocks and creep down streets, on the prowl for open parking spots? Burning fuel, they simmer silently in their seats, running late for work and appointments. Thankfully, technology has some solutions to ease the pain of finding parking.

Engineers Marco Gruteser and Wade Trappe of Rutgers University have combined ultrasonic sensors, GPS receivers, and cellular data networks to create a handy and ultra-cheap “parking-spot finder.” Their system distributes the task of finding vacant parking spots to sensors placed on a number of roving vehicles, and then combines the info to make a map of all the available parking in a region. That map could theoretically be accessed through smart phones or dashboard navigation devices.

Technology Review reports:

The engineers devised a prototype of a sensing platform using a $20 ultrasonic sensor that reports the distance to the nearest obstacle and a $100 GPS receiver that notes the corresponding location. They connected both to a lightweight PC with a Wi-Fi card to transmit the data to a central server.

The researchers developed an algorithm that detects parked vehicles based on the ultrasonic sensor’s readings of obstacles. Based on the objects’ width and depth, the readings were further refined to filter away parked bicycles and trees. Then, they integrated this data with maps, to pinpoint the exact location of available parking. The engineers report that they were accurate 95 percent of the time finding slotted parking spaces using this algorithm, and were right 96 percent of the time detecting unslotted parking.

The researchers say that as cars like taxicabs drive around busy areas, they could use the sensors to collect data. The information collected by cabs could be sent to a large central server using cellular networks, and all that info could then be combined to create detailed maps of available spaces. The researchers say this information could be sent back to cars with commercial GPS receivers, if a deal is struck with the navigation companies.

If employed, the Rutgers team’s cheap networking sensors could end up saving cities like San Francisco millions of dollars in “smart parking infrastructure.” Already, the SFpark project in San Francisco allows real time information on parking at metered spaces. The fixed sensors used in that system cost $500 to install and maintain each year–adding up to a tidy $3 million annually. The Rutgers engineers estimate that they could outfit 300 San Francisco cabs for about $200,000, and they say that cab fleet could cover the city’s entire downtown.

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Image: flickr / Extra Ketchup

Utah is only one state over, so when I see a website that tells me a fragment of a comet will hit it on March 1 of this year, I sit up and take notice.

Then I see the flashing text. The multiple colors. The GIANT FONT. The URL: satansrapture.com. Well, still. It can’t be all wrong can it? And then I see the title: "BIBLE CODE PREDICTIONS 2010".

Oh. I guess it can be all wrong.

OK, Utah, you can rest easy. I’m guessing March 1 will come and go with no comet impact, fragment or otherwise. The Bible code is a long debunked piece of antiscience garbage, basically just people looking at random patterns until they find one that kinda sorta if you squint your eyes and plug up your ears and yell LALALALALALA looks like it might say something sorta correct.

Maybe.

Anyway, I wouldn’t normally link to such low-level and obvious nonsense, but no matter how silly a doomsday claim is, there will always be people out there who take it seriously. So just in case, here you go: there are no scientific predictions that a comet piece will hit Utah, and the Bible Code is total 100% fictitious nonsense.

Unless… hmmm. The Earth is hit by about 100 tons of cosmic debris every night. A lot of that is from comets, small (and I mean small) bits of fluff shed off of previous comet passes. And if you live in Utah and go out March 1, you’re sure to see at least one or two shooting stars…

So maybe that website is right!

Or not. I’m guessing not.