Why does the alphabet’s 24th letter designate the nameless?

[…]

It probably starts with the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who in his 1637 book “La Géometrie” first systematically used a lower-case “x,” together with “y” and “z,” to signify an unknown quantity in simple algebraic equations. […] We now jump […] from 1637 to 1895, when Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a new type of radiation. Röntgen, who wasn’t sure just what he had come across, named his find in German X-Strahlen, using the algebraic symbol for something unknown. […] “X-ray” has remained our English word and has also contributed, with the help of the term “X-ray vision,” to x’s ability to evoke the uncanny.

{ Forward | Continue reading }

previously { XXX, XXY, XYY }

photo { Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin }

Guy Scratches Own Back, Finds Knife Blade Someone Stuck In There Three Years Ago.

The Transportation Security Administration’s plan to allow small knives on planes has sparked a revolt in Congress.

French man arrested after posing as an airline pilot and gaining access to the cockpit on a US Airways flight.

The study, at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine in Baltimore, found that a single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was enough to cause positive effects for up to a year. Single magic mushroom can change personality.

New method to mass produce anti-cancer natural killer cells from embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells.

The paradoxical relationship between religious belief and criminality.

Bubble Weapons System. The new system unleashes “bubble plumes” which can, claim Raytheon, create large regions of “bubbleized” water. These plumes can not only damage a ship’s power-train, but also, in the case of a large vessel, sink it by causing it to break in two due to uneven buoyancy.

Doomsday Recalculation Gives Humanity Greater Chance of Long-Term Survival.

11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox.

Over the past few weeks I have been working on mapping a cemetery in a Geographic Information System (GIS).

Why do chimpanzees build nests?

Is Taking Your Pet on an Airplane Worth the Risk?

Engineering analyses of Noah’s ark.

⚓.

I’ve been posting my letters…

XYY syndrome is an aneuploidy (abnormal number) of the sex chromosomes in which a human male receives an extra Y-chromosome.

Some medical geneticists question whether the term “syndrome” is appropriate for this condition because its clinical phenotype is normal and the vast majority (an estimated 97% in Britain) of 47,XYY males do not know their karyotype.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Triple X syndrome is a form of chromosomal variation characterized by the presence of an extra X chromosome in each cell of a human female. The condition occurs only in females. […]

Because of the lyonization, inactivation, and formation of a Barr body in all female cells, only one X chromosome is active at any time. Thus, Triple X syndrome most often has only mild effects, or has no unusual effects at all.

Symptoms may include tall stature; small head (microcephaly); vertical skinfolds that may cover the inner corners of the eyes (epicanthal folds); delayed development of certain motor skills, speech and language; learning disabilities, such as dyslexia; or weak muscle tone.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Klinefelter syndrome, or XXY syndrome, is a genetic disorder in which there is at least one extra X chromosome to a standard human male karyotype, for a total of 47 chromosomes rather than the 46 found in genetically normal humans. […]

This chromosome constitution exists in roughly between 1:500 to 1:1000 live male births but many of these people may not show symptoms. […]

Affected males are often infertile, or may have reduced fertility. […] XXY males are also more likely than other men to have certain health problems, which typically affect females, such as breast cancer and osteoporosis.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photos { Frieke Janssens }

“We really wanted to be a power couple when we got together in our early twenties,” says Julie softly. “We were both going to work and raise our kids together, taking on equal responsibility. But my commitment to my job meant Rob had to take on a lot of female-gendered roles, like cooking and cleaning, and we rarely had sex because we were both tired. It just wasn’t fun. We were sleep deprived, overweight, and had a healthy bank account.”

Rob laughs, as if the answer was simple and under their noses the entire time.

“We thought one day: Wow! We’re not taking advantage of our economically superior position as educated cisgendered heterosexual white people! We need to start capitalizing on this shit. Julie can stay at home working on her blog and tweeting about the kids, I can spend more time earning money and feeding my sense of self-importance. I mean – fuck everyone else who doesn’t have our opportunities in life. If you’re a single black mother on welfare, that’s your problem. We have mediocre sex at least once a week now and Julie’s blog had fifty unique page views last month.”

{ The World Breaks Everyone | Continue reading | Thanks Max }

Don’t mistake addiction for love. This is tricky because, neurochemically speaking, the two are very similar–studies have shown that when romantic partners who are intensely in love are exposed to photographs of their beloved, the brain regions that become activated are the same regions that are activated in cocaine addicts when they are craving cocaine. But even if love has some addiction-like qualities, healthy love is likely to involve other qualities as well, such as respect, trust, and commitment, qualities that keep a relationship strong even on those days when excitement and passion are not at the forefront. Addictive love, by contrast, tends to be more singularly focused on attaining those “highs,” whatever the cost. Partners whose behavior is unpredictable (e.g., they don’t call when they say they will), are, unfortunately, especially likely to keep you hooked, since their inconsistent affection keeps you on your toes and wanting more. If you are trying to break free from a relationship that feels more like an addiction than a loving bond,  one strategy is to reframe your thoughts and emotions about that person as if they are cold, clinical biological processes in order to gain a healthy distance from them. For example, after a week of not calling Mr. or Ms. Wrong, you feel a wave of longing in your chest and think, “But I really do love him/her… I should call him/her right now…” Instead, you could notice that sensation and tell yourself, “Interesting, there goes my caudate nucleus releasing dopamine and producing a sensation of longing. Okay, back to work.”

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

Traffic police issue tickets to pickup two days in a row, despite dead body inside.

US grants first license to sell 3D-printed guns.

US companies seek final approval to start slaughtering horses for food.

Hurricane Sandy caused over $185 million worth of damage to the World Trade Center site.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft has become the first man-made object to exit our solar system.

Billionaire Bezos uses robots to raise Apollo 11 rocket engines after 40 years underwater.

So what’s a credit card customer to do when a merchant asks for a ZIP code at the cash register? Just say no.

8 Tips for Growing A Greenhouse Organic Vegetable Garden.

Why do Burger King and McDonald’s start to sell the same salad? There’s a name for that phenomenon.

Why does the driver of a car rarely get carsick?

Teenagers run and play on large white sand dunes in New Mexico, 1957.

Prevailing wisdom suggests that our genes remain largely fixed over time. But, an emerging field of research is beginning to prove this intuition wrong. Scientists are uncovering increasing evidence that changes in the expression of hundreds of genes can occur as a result of the social environments we inhabit. As a result of these dynamics, experiences we have today can affect our health for days and even months into the future. […]

People who experience chronic social isolation show reduced antiviral immune response gene activity, which leaves them vulnerable to viral infections like the common cold. […] Other social conditions that have been found to influence human gene expression include being socially evaluated or rejected, which can have different consequences for different people depending on their sensitivity to social threat.

{ APS | Continue reading }

photo { Jonathan Waiter }

The decline of two-parent households may be a significant reason for the divergent fortunes of male workers, whose earnings generally declined in recent decades, and female workers, whose earnings generally increased, a prominent labor economist argues in a new survey of existing research. […]

Only 63 percent of children lived in a household with two parents in 2010, down from 82 percent in 1970. The single parents raising the rest of those children are predominantly female. And there is growing evidence that sons raised by single mothers “appear to fare particularly poorly,” Professor Autor wrote in an analysis for Third Way, a center-left policy research organization. […]

Men who are less successful are less attractive as partners, so women are choosing to raise children by themselves, producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners. […]

“I think the greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labor market screaming out ‘You need more education’ and have been able to respond to that, and men have not,” said Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. economics professor. […]

Professor Autor said in an interview that he was intrigued by evidence suggesting the consequences were larger for boys than girls, including one study finding that single mothers spent an hour less per week with their sons than their daughters. Another study of households where the father had less education, or was absent entirely, found the female children were 10 to 14 percent more likely to complete college. A third study of single-parent homes found boys were less likely than girls to enroll in college. […]

Instead of making marriage more attractive, he said, it might be better for society to help make men more attractive.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Can a country with a GDP ($23 billion) only 1/10th the size of Detroit, Michigan or one half of Tulsa, Oklahoma be a systemic risk to the global economy and clip, say, $300 billion in value, off the U.S. stock market?  […] Detroit, for example, is on its way to bankruptcy and you hardly hear a peep from the Euro Bears or their American comrades.

{ Global Macro Monitor/Ritholtz | Continue reading }

previously { Baby Ben Bernanke }

Ukraine’s ‘Killer’ Dolphins Not Killers, Not Gone – Military.

{ Kickstarter }

What we know is that the consumption of shoes in the UK has undergone radical change during the last decade. A 2006 survey of attitudes and practices around shoes by the magazine Harper’s Bazaar revealed among its findings that 25% of British women would buy shoes before paying bills.

{ Sociological Research Online | Continue reading }

Danish Justin Bieber lookalike, now with a record contract.

FDA shut down a New Jersey bakery after finding sugar in its sugar free goods and saturated fat in its fat free treats.

Early birds had four wings, not two.

Global Night Light Patterns Reveal Economic Shift to the East.

Soldiers and Families Can Suffer Negative Effects from Modern Communication Technologies, Says MU Researcher.

In this paper we analyze how the shutdown of the popular Megaupload site affected the digital sales of movies for two major studios.

Despite Apple’s popularity in China, it’s time for the company to move its factories out of the country.

Last year, a group of researchers in Austria refined a 3D printing technique that allowed the construction of sophisticated structures smaller than dust mites in about 4 minutes. Now, a company in Germany has made a 3D printer which can produce detailed structures on a similar scale but faster.

People can correctly identify a wide range of dog emotions by sight.

How do roosters know when to crow, even when the lights are turned off.

Did he, and other Vikings, really use a brutal method of ritual execution called the “blood eagle”?

The archaic medical practice of recognizing mental illness and “idiocy” based on appearance.

Motorcycle club members wear studded leather jackets and rakish caps in London, England, June 1966.

Partially-bicycle-powered espresso maker.

Big splash [gif].

If you’re into first-person running and combat, this is right up your alley.

Blockbuster movies without visual effects.

You had one job.

The average bicycle police officer spends 24 hours a week on his bicycle and previous studies have shown riding a bicycle with a traditional (nosed) saddle has been associated with urogenital paresthesia and sexual dysfunction. […]

The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the no-nose bicycle saddle as an ergonomic intervention and their acceptance among male bicycle police officers. Bicycle police officers from five U.S. metropolitan areas were recruited for this study. […]

After 6 months, 90 men were reassessed. Only three men had returned to a traditional saddle.

{ International Society for Sexual Medicine | PDF | via Improbable }

images { 1. Charles Ray | 2. Dietmar Busse }

All seems to indicate that the next decade, the 20s, will be the magic decade of the brain, with amazing science but also amazing applications. With the development of nanoscale neural probes and high speed, two-way Brain-Computer interfaces (BCI), by the end of the next decade we may have our iPhones implanted in our brains and become a telepathic species. […]

Last month the New York Times revealed that the Obama Administration may soon seek billions of dollars from Congress for a Brain Activity Map (BAM) project. […] The project may be partly based on the paper “The Brain Activity Map Project and the Challenge of Functional Connectomics” (Neuron, June 2012) by six well-known neuroscientists. […]

A new paper “The Brain Activity Map” (Science, March 2013), written as an executive summary by the same six neuroscientists and five more, is more explicit: “The Brain Activity Map (BAM), could put neuroscientists in a position to understand how the brain produces perception, action, memories, thoughts, and consciousness… Within 5 years, it should be possible to monitor and/or to control tens of thousands of neurons, and by year 10 that number will increase at least 10-fold. By year 15, observing 1 million neurons with markedly reduced invasiveness should be possible. With 1 million neurons, scientists will be able to evaluate the function of the entire brain of the zebrafish or several areas from the cerebral cortex of the mouse. In parallel, we envision developing nanoscale neural probes that can locally acquire, process, and store accumulated data. Networks of “intelligent” nanosystems would be capable of providing specific responses to externally applied signals, or to their own readings of brain activity.”

{ IEET | Continue reading }

photo { Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin }

{ Rockets with plastic golf balls, replace driver clubs, as they fly to the green no matter how far. Shawn Kelly, golf pro, will compete against Doug Frost, the inventor of Rocketry Golf, who has built and flown Rockets since 1957 and has won over a dozen awards at 15 national rocket contests. | Rocketry | PRWeb }

Objective: To describe the epidemiology of genital injuries caused by trouser zips and to educate both consumers and the caregivers of patients who sustain such injuries.

[…]

Conclusion: Zip-related genital injuries affect both paediatric and adult cohorts. Practitioners should be familiar with various zip-detachment strategies for these populations.

{ PubMed | Continue reading }

Roofies — a street name for the drug flunitrazepam, sold under the brand name Rohypnol — have never been approved for sale in the U.S. A quick glance through some of the other popular street names will give a clue as to why: roaches, mind erasers, ropies, wolfies, forget pills, and the date-rape drug are among the most menacing endearments for the stuff.

The drug was developed in the 1970s by Hoffman LaRoche and began appearing stateside in the 1980s, but the FDA never approved it, not even as a sleep aid, the intention for which it was originally developed. Elsewhere, it’s sold as that or as a hypnotic, which — I don’t even know what to say about living in a country like Sweden, where you could be prescribed a hypnotic. It’s also used to treat hospital patients in preparation for surgery. Here in the U.S., the Safe Streets and Communities Act of 2012 reclassified it a Schedule I drug — one with no medical value whatsoever, like cocaine and heroin.

The side effects of flunitrazepam are what make it such a troubling concoction. In addition to slowing psychomotor performance (e.g., the ability to run away if threatened) and causing whatever combination of relaxation, sedation, and suggestibility, which brings about the designation hypnotic in Europe, the drug also causes memory loss. A standard dosage — one or two milligrams — can last for eight to 12 hours, with hangover effects extending from several days to over a week. It’s also highly addictive. And it can kill you. Although some merely vomit.

Users self-administer roofies as a sleep aid, to enhance the effects of alcohol, or to mitigate depression caused by withdrawal from other drugs. (I’m told it’s a great rush.) Yet flunitrazepam isn’t always self-administered, which is where the mythology that surrounds the stuff is born. It’s been known to have been given to people, unwittingly if not against their will. This is because most who have ingested a standard dosage will exhibit within fifteen minutes a troubling combination of physical docility and compliant suggestibility.

{ Anne Elizabeth Moore/TNI | Continue reading }

So, it’s mid-March 2013 and, the S&P 500 is at 1550, right where I said it would be nine months ago. […] I see the S&P continuing to frustrate the majority (that is what markets do).  It may hit 1560-1580 prior to actually having a legitimate correction of 5-10%.  There is so much liquidity awaiting deployment upon a pullback that the pullback will be quick.  Later in the year, it’s very likely we’ll see 1600-plus on the S&P (September-November).  In my view, the market will be a good sell at that point, so will many credit products.  There is no way the Fed can shift its policy stance concurrent with having to immunize a $4 trillion balance sheet going into the end of a fiscal year.  2014 is likely to be challenging.
 
Enjoy this while it lasts. […]

The People’s Republic’s big issues will start in fiscal years 2013-2014.  China Merchants Bank, for example, is already seeing a bigger rise in bad-loan provisioning and lower good-loan growth than Western equity analysts think.  The CEOs of two large Brazilian companies, Vale and Petrobras, are starting to plan for China to “hit a wall” in 2015-2018. Essentially, China will look OK through April 2013 then big problems will hit the country.

Europe will not implode.

{ Secret top source/Minyanville | Continue reading }

A sophisticated scheme to use a casino’s own security systems against it has netted scammers $33m in a high-stakes poker game after they were able to gain a crucial advantage by seeing the opposition’s cards.

The team used a high-rolling accomplice from overseas who was known to spend large amounts while gambling at Australia’s biggest casino, the Crown in Melbourne, according to the Herald Sun. He and his family checked into the Crown and were accommodated in one of its $30,000-a-night villas.

The player then joined a private high-stakes poker game in a private suite. At the same time, an unnamed person got access to the casino’s CCTV systems in the poker room and fed the information he gleaned back to the player via a wireless link. Over the course of eight hands the team fleeced the opposition to the tune of $33m.

{ The Register | Continue reading }

srceenshot { Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson: Bond Girl and Goldfinger’s aide-de-camp, whom Bond catches helping the villain cheat at a game of cards. He seduces her, but for her betrayal, she is completely painted in gold paint and dies from ’skin suffocation’ (a fictional condition Ian Fleming created for the novel; the skin does not actually “breathe”). }