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Linguistics is undoubtedly one of the most misunderstood of the sciences. Many people see linguists as finger-waving language critics, and even some other scientists don’t think of the field as “real science.” But linguists may get the chance to set the record straight this weekend with the release of the sci-fi blockbuster Arrival. The film follows linguistics professor Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, after a series of mysterious alien spacecraft suddenly appear in Earth’s skies. While the world reacts with confusion and fear to the extraterrestrial visitors, Banks is recruited by the U.S. military to make contact with the aliens—large, seven-limbed “heptapods”—and make sense of their bizarre language, the written version of which constructs entire sentences as impossibly complex circles without a set word order. As it becomes increasingly clear just how different the heptapods are from humans, it’s up to Banks to understand what they’re trying to tell us—and to possibly save humanity in the process. The film’s attention to linguistic detail, thanks in part to scientific advisers including linguist Jessica Coon of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has had many in the field watching Arrival's arrival with a close eye. A po[CENSORED]r linguistics blog has already taken an in-depth look at the contents of Banks’s on-set office, and linguists have started to share their thoughts after attending advanced screenings of the film. So far, the verdict has been mostly positive. “The linguistics was very good,” says David Adger, a linguist at Queen Mary University of London who specializes in syntax, the rules that govern sentence structure. “The portrayal of trying different hypotheses about the language, coming up with generalizations, and testing them out was spot on. It gave a good sense of the excitement of fieldwork on a new language, as well as of some of the frustrations.” “There’s a lot regarding the experience of being a linguist that rang true,” says Jennifer Nycz, a linguist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “For example, the fact that other characters in the film expect the linguist to just know all the languages, including the alien one. None of us are C-3PO!” But the work of understanding a new language is only a small part of what linguists actually do. “For many of us, the focus of our work is less about the details of any particular language and more about larger questions, like how languages are learned,” says Georgetown linguist Nicholas Subtirelu. He adds that the film focuses on the multilingual abilities of Banks in a way that feeds into po[CENSORED]r perceptions of linguists as “professional polyglots.” Linguists also questioned Arrival's perspective on the age-old dispute: What is the place of linguistics in science? In the film, Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist (played by Jeremy Renner) working with Banks “in the field,” perceives the two to be separate. “The cornerstone of society isn’t language—it’s science,” he says to Banks, shortly after they first meet. Nycz disagrees with the implication. “The linguistics versus science contrast is false,” she says. It reflects a common idea that science deals with physical objects of study like photons, cells, and atoms, rather than a way of acquiring knowledge, she adds. “Not all linguists take a scientific approach to the study of language … but many do, or strive to.” As it turns out (spoiler alert), of the film’s two leads, it’s Banks who makes the breakthrough that leads to mutual understanding. But what would happen if we were actually visited by aliens and needed to understand them? “Language on earth is both physically and socially embedded. That is, we speak and hear (or sign and see) with the bodies and brains we have, and we use language in the context of our society,” Nycz says. “So I'd have to know something about their physiology, their cognition, and their society to even begin to speculate.”

Lest you leap to the conclusion that we’ve gone soft, joining up with some sort of New Gilded Age glamping caravan, understand that taking the 2016 Bentley Mulsanne Speed camping was in no way premeditated. A site had been reserved at Silver Lake State Park long before this Sopwith Camel–hued limo arrived at Eisenhower Place. It was actually the flat, lacquer look of the green paint (a $5715 option that Bentley calls British Racing Green, although it isn’t) that convinced us this would be a good idea. The car would look stunning in the woods, we thought, and it did. Pack It Up, Pack It In Ours would still be a classic Michigan camping trip, with sleeping bags and inflatable air mattresses and tents and hot dogs and s’mores and a cooler full of beer. The only difference would be that the 6000-pound vehicle we’d be packing all our gear into would be sporting carbon-fiber interior trim and dual iPads for its rear-seat passengers (part of a $28,760 Entertainment Specification package). And it would cost a total of $397,732, including a $335,600 base price, $56,407 worth of options, $2725 for delivery, and a $3000 gas-guzzler tax. We probably should have stuck with something more like a Chevy Suburban, which would have had a top speed a bit lower than the claimed 190 mph of the Speed but also would’ve been easier to pack. The first thing you notice when you lay eyes upon the Mulsanne’s shallow, nicely carpeted trunk—and try to do that spatial-estimation thing with the huge pile of stuff that you plan on bringing along—is that said trunk is ridiculously small, at least with respect to the rest of the 18-foot-long car. The EPA lists the Bentley’s cargo volume at 11 cubic feet. By comparison, an Audi A8 has 15 and a Cadillac XTS boasts an 18-cubic-foot cargo hold. But neither of those models has umbrellas (two of them, for $210) mounted in its boot. Since we had not hired a team of elephants, or sherpas, or rented a U-Haul trailer, our cooler had to go in the back seat. It wouldn’t even fit in the empty trunk because it was too tall. Lots of other stuff got crammed in the back, too, and in the process of packing we noticed just how much the fantastic interior of the Mulsanne suffers from being kitted out with carbon-fiber trim rather than the customary wood. We would later explain our feelings on this issue by saying, “You wouldn’t go camping in a carbon-fiber forest,” a metaphor perhaps inspired by sitting around a late-night fire. Home / Features / Bentley / Mulsanne Speed / 2016 Bentley Mulsanne Speed: We Go Camping with a $400,000 Mega-Sedan - Feature VIEW 57 PHOTOS FEATURE 2016 Bentley Mulsanne Speed: We Go Camping with a $400,000 Mega-Sedan Hello Mother, Hello Father, Greetings from Camp Miles-Per-Hour. AUG 2015 BY JEFF SABATINI MULTIPLE PHOTOGRAPHERS SHARE TWEET Lest you leap to the conclusion that we’ve gone soft, joining up with some sort of New Gilded Age glamping caravan, understand that taking the 2016 Bentley Mulsanne Speed camping was in no way premeditated. A site had been reserved at Silver Lake State Park long before this Sopwith Camel–hued limo arrived at Eisenhower Place. It was actually the flat, lacquer look of the green paint (a $5715 option that Bentley calls British Racing Green, although it isn’t) that convinced us this would be a good idea. The car would look stunning in the woods, we thought, and it did. Pack It Up, Pack It In Ours would still be a classic Michigan camping trip, with sleeping bags and inflatable air mattresses and tents and hot dogs and s’mores and a cooler full of beer. The only difference would be that the 6000-pound vehicle we’d be packing all our gear into would be sporting carbon-fiber interior trim and dual iPads for its rear-seat passengers (part of a $28,760 Entertainment Specification package). And it would cost a total of $397,732, including a $335,600 base price, $56,407 worth of options, $2725 for delivery, and a $3000 gas-guzzler tax. We probably should have stuck with something more like a Chevy Suburban, which would have had a top speed a bit lower than the claimed 190 mph of the Speed but also would’ve been easier to pack. The first thing you notice when you lay eyes upon the Mulsanne’s shallow, nicely carpeted trunk—and try to do that spatial-estimation thing with the huge pile of stuff that you plan on bringing along—is that said trunk is ridiculously small, at least with respect to the rest of the 18-foot-long car. The EPA lists the Bentley’s cargo volume at 11 cubic feet. By comparison, an Audi A8 has 15 and a Cadillac XTS boasts an 18-cubic-foot cargo hold. But neither of those models has umbrellas (two of them, for $210) mounted in its boot. Since we had not hired a team of elephants, or sherpas, or rented a U-Haul trailer, our cooler had to go in the back seat. It wouldn’t even fit in the empty trunk because it was too tall. Lots of other stuff got crammed in the back, too, and in the process of packing we noticed just how much the fantastic interior of the Mulsanne suffers from being kitted out with carbon-fiber trim rather than the customary wood. We would later explain our feelings on this issue by saying, “You wouldn’t go camping in a carbon-fiber forest,” a metaphor perhaps inspired by sitting around a late-night fire. VIEW 57 PHOTOS After packing there was still plenty of room for one rear passenger to luxuriate, recline, and be chauffeured, even if that person hadn’t been a child, which that person was. One of the motorized tray tables with integrated iPads became stuck in the down position shortly after the Mulsanne had arrived at the office, so we decreed that the other tray was not to be lowered, lest it also break. This displeased the child, who spent the three-hour drive grumbling about all the Minecraft that was not being played and asking the age-old question, “Are we there yet?” To which the driver was able to respond, “No, but we’re making good time.” The Bentley Mulsanne Speed will allow its adaptive cruise control, a $3895 option, to be set as high as 155 mph. We did not reach that irresponsible speed on the highway—not even close—although we did enjoy the way the big Bentley could storm up on gaggles of traffic, obliterating gaps between cars so quickly that left-lane dawdlers often got out of the way. Quantifying Speed When we later put the Speed through its paces at the test track, it ran the quarter-mile in 13.5 seconds at 105 mph and did zero to 60 mph in 4.8 seconds. The former is a tenth slower than the standard Mulsanne we tested, while the latter is a tenth quicker. So while the Speed is tuned to produce 25 extra horses, for a total of 530 horsepower, and an extra 59 lb-ft of torque, 811 lb-ft in all, those additional numbers seem not to move out of the realm of margin of error for the Mulsanne’s 6.8-liter twin-turbocharged V-8. As Bentley charges an extra $31,900 for the Speed over the standard Mulsanne, that amounts to $1276 per horsepower and $540.68 per lb-ft of torque. This engine, of course, is still the venerable Bentley V-8 whose specific dimensions (but not design) date back to the Harold Macmillan administration, further developed this year with new cylinder heads. Bentley redesigned the combustion chamber and inlet port while repositioning the spark plug and fuel injector, changes which the company claims make the engine 13 percent more efficient on the European test cycle, thus extending the Mulsanne’s range by 50 miles. Its EPA rating, however, stays the same at 13 mpg combined. We saw 15 mpg in our highway-centric drive, compared with 12 when we tested the regular Mulsanne with the pre-update version of this engine. On the road, the Speed drives just as the Mulsanne ever has, big but not outsized, with handling that’s impressive for its dimensions. Our test car pulled the same 0.81 g’s on the skidpad as that last Mulsanne we tested, a number that when looked at in isolation undersells how much fun it is to wheel one of these freighters through some curves. The Bentley leans prodigiously even when its air suspension is in Sport mode, but it also absorbs crater-esque road imperfections without unsettling its balance. Its steering is excellent, telling you just enough about what its front tires are doing and allowing you to wield this bludgeon like a scalpel, which is important given its length and mass. Camp Miles-Per-Hour Upon arriving at the campsite, the Mulsanne Speed certainly attracted more attention than our neighbor’s Subaru Outback. Your average camper at Silver Lake State Park is more knowledgeable about cars than would be typical, as the Michigan Department of Natural Resources runs an off-road vehicle area here, where those so inclined can drive on the dunes between Silver Lake and Lake Michigan. So we were inundated with not only “What is that?” and “It costs how much?!” types of queries, but also technical questions. More than one glint-eyed onlooker wanted to know whether we were going to try the Speed out on the dunes, which we explained would be a bad idea, as unlike the rest of the Bentley range, the Mulsanne is rear-drive only. While we were parked, the Speed served dutifully as the world’s most expensive and inefficient iPhone charger and also assisted in running our Handpresso in-car espresso maker. Firing up the big V-8 in the morning produced so little noise that those late sleepers in our party were not awakened, and after half an hour it was so quiet we had forgotten whether we’d left it idling. Unsurprising, really, as even blasting down the freeway driving home through the rain, the Speed’s serenity was matched only by that of our lazy weekend.

Femeile duc o viață dublă. Una legată de realitate și una imaginară, alimentată de chestii care au doar tangențial de-a face cu realitatea. Rolul tău ca bărbat este să pășești și-n viața ei imaginară și, uneori, să i-o umpli cu prezența ta. Ce face un bărbat când cunoaște o femeie de care se simte atras? Poate face o grămadă de lucruri. Unele dintre acestea sunt ale naibii de inspirate, altele sunt doar căi simple de-a rata în seducție. Când vine vorba de-a rata în seducție, cele mai obișnuite acțiuni sunt: 1. îi oferă cadouri unei tipe pe care abia a cunoscut-o 2. încearcă să devină un fel de confident / prietenă de-a ei 3. împrumută atitudini din comediile romantice în credința că astfel este mai amuzant sau vulnerabil într-un mod plăcut 4. este disperat să-i fie tot timpul în preajmă sau în contact cu ea pe Facebook, telefonic, WhatsApp, SMS-uri etc. 5. încearcă să-i rezolve orice problemă cu care aceasta se confruntă în viața reală sau în cea imaginară Despre unele dintre aceste erori am mai scris deja pe blog sau în ghiduri. Despre ce-a de-a 5-a eroare din această listă voi scrie acum pe larg. Absolut toate femeile au o viață dublă Nu te gândi la prostii, nu la genul respectiv de viață dublă mă refer. Viață dublă înseamnă că au o viață reală și una imaginară. Cele două vieți li se-mpletesc atât de des încât este greu de știut unde naiba se află mintea lor în fiecare moment al zilei. Din fericire, nu e absolut obligatoriu să știi asta cu exactitate. O bună parte din farmecul lor ca femei ține inclusiv de acest lucru. Totuși, pentru buna ta cunoaștere, ar fi bine să știi care-i treaba cu viața imaginară și ce ai tu de făcut pentru a fi-n mintea ei indiferent pe unde i se plimbă gândurile. În mare, viața ei imaginară este produsul unor influențe externe. De cele mai multe ori, media reușește să alimenteze cam cel mai mult această viață imaginară a femeilor. Ce urmărește la TV, ce face pe net, ce cărți sau reviste citește, toate îi influențează viața imaginară. Mă refer aici la filme, seriale, show-uri (inclusiv cele cu și pentru cei cu IQ subunitar gen Noră pentru Mamă), prosteală pe Facebook, articole stupide din Cosmopolitan, scufundări în opera lui Coelho, lecturi serioase etc. De asemenea, o influență importantă o pot avea și cei din cercurile sale de prieteni. Ideea aceea conform căreia ești un fel de medie a celor mai frecvente 5 interacțiuni din viața ta este adevărată. Dacă ea-și petrece toată ziua în compania unor pițipoance triste, atunci sunt șanse mari ca și ea să fie la același nivel. Prin urmare, ochii mari și judecata limpede. Dacă joacă rolul victimei, “omoar-o” repede Problema cu influența media asupra vieții imaginare a femeilor este că multe dintre ele vor să trăiască ceea ce văd prin filme sau prin cărți sau pe net. Dacă se poate, exact ceea ce văd în filme, exact ceea ce citesc în cărți, exact ceea ce văd pe net (din păcate, unele dintre ele nu se uită suficient la filme porno). Cum există filme de dragoste, comedii, filme de acțiune, SF-uri, horror etc., în mintea lor pot apărea tot felul de așteptări apropo de interacțiunile cu cei din jur, inclusiv cu tine. O dată cu așteptările, apar și diverse manifestări, unele plăcute, interesante. Altele mai degrabă ciudate, sufocante, iritante. Cea mai frecventă, ți-am mai vorbit despre ea, este foamea de dramă. Vrea și ea tensiune sexuală de un anumit fel, vrea și ea certuri spectaculoase, vrea și ea să aibă parte de tot felul de piedici în manifestarea dragostei, vrea și ea să o furi cum o fură Brad Pitt pe tipa aia din Meet Joe Black. Din fericire, faptul că vrea toate reprezintă un fel de avantaj pentru tine, dacă-ți joci cărțile așa cum te-nvăț eu pe blog și-n ghiduri. Totuși, există o manifestare a femeilor care înmoaie bărbații mai ceva decât reușește o tigaie încinsă să topească o bucată de unt. Femeilor le place să simuleze statutul de victimă și bărbații au tendința reflexă de-a le salva. Vei auzi femei pe care abia le-ai cunoscut că se plâng de diverse – că a avut parte numai de nemernici, că are un șef aiurea, că are colegi nașpa, că prietenele ei o invidiază, că maică-sa o bate la cap, că nu-i ajung banii, inclusiv că se teme că vei suferi tu în relație cu ea… Bun… Ce faci tu-n situații de astea? Dacă-i victimă, “omoar-o”! Sper că vezi ghilimele, sper că-nțelegi c-o spun metaforic. A o “omorî” în situații de genul acesta înseamnă să nu-i oferi ceea ce ea se așteaptă să primească în urma atitudinilor, reacțiilor, faptelor ei. Adică fără consolare, încurajare sau, culmea penibilului, ceea ce eu am numit un fel de 69 al smiorcăiților. 69 al smiorcăiților înseamnă că ea plânge pe umărul tău și tu, ca un măscărici începi să plângi și tu pe umărul ei dezvăluindu-i cât de dificilă este și viața ta. Dacă nu-i oferi ceea ce se aștepată să-i oferi, cum reacționezi totuși? Simplu… Indiferent de ce probleme are, îi spui ușor amuzat, fără răutate sau ironii veninoase că nu te pricepi la chestiile respective. E genul de situație-n care poți să nu te pricepi și totuși să nu pari fraier, ci chiar din contră. Îți spune că a avut parte numai de nemernici în viața ei? Îi spui că nu te pricepi decât să fii la rândul tău nemernic, dar că ești fair play, îi dai voie să fie și ea, ca să fiți chit. Îți spune că prietenele ei sunt invidioase pe ea? Îi spui că nu te pricepi la apucăturile femeilor dacă nu-s de natură sexuală. C-ai dezvoltat această unică pricepere ca o reacție de autoapărare a organismului în fața abuzurilor tipelor cu care ai de-a face. Îți spune că are probleme la muncă? Îi spui că nu te pricepi la problemele legate de muncă pentru că tu faci o distincție clară între cine ești și ce este munca ta. Îți spune că n-are bani? Îi spui că o înțelegi de vreme ce nu te pricepi la rândul tău să faci bani și că acesta este motivul pentru care accepți destul de des să fii întreținut de femeile cu care ai de-a face. Ideea este să-i arăți cât se poate de limpede că dramele ei se ofilesc atunci când îți sunt dezvăluite ție. După ce se ofilesc, ghici ce se-ntâmplă cu dramele respective? Mor. De aici și metafora cu “omoar-o repede!” – îi omori bucata din ea care se smiorcăie și care umblă cu limba scoasă după drame. Ce faci dacă-ți reproșează că ești un tip lipsit de emoții Unele drame nu mor suficient de repede. Se ofilesc, dar se adapă din cine știe ce alte surse și, brusc, încearcă să înflorească din nou la primul contact cu tine. Mai mult, unele femei sunt în stare să-ncerce un tratament urgent de salvare a dramelor de care sunt atât de îndrăgostite. Adică să-ți reproșeze că nu-ți pasă suficient de ea și că reacțiile tale sunt cele ale unui tip lipsit de empatie, de sentimente. Nu ceda. Pentru unii bărbați, e foarte tentant să cedeze în speranța că dacă reușesc să dovedească sub o formă sau alta că ei sunt în realitate foarte simțitori și că le pasă, automat vor primi un fel de sex-răsplată. Nu ceda. Nu face eroarea asta. E posibil să primești acel sex răsplată, dar, moral vorbind, vei primi ceea ce se poate numi lejer “o muie”. Nu face eroarea asta. Omoară-i apucăturile de smiorcăită rapid și abia apoi salveaz-o cât dorești, în ce poziții vrei. Ce-nseamnă să o salvezi după ce i-ai omorât apucăturile de smiorcăită A salva o femeie în cazul de față înseamnă a o elibera de apucăturile ei dramatice și de-ai orienta gândurile spre cu totul alte direcții. Inclusiv, în direcția ta. Există o vorbă care spune că-n spatele bărbaților puternici stau femei puternice. Având în vedere că trăim vremuri cu suficientă libertate sexuală, se poate întâmpla ca-n spatele unui bărbat puternic să ajungă un travestit extrem de puternic. Dincolo de glume proaste, fiecare-i liber să se joace cu cine vrea, când vrea, cum vrea. Nu e treaba nimănui ce le place unora sau altora să facă. Ca idee însă, nu doar femeile sunt un sprijin real pentru bărbați, și bărbații pot și cam trebuie să influențeze evoluția femeilor din viața lor. Rolul tău ca bărbat nu este doar de-a te culca cu femeile care te atrag sau doar de-a procrea sau doar de-a întemeia o familie, de-a construi case, de-a planta pomi și de-a te masturba cu ochii la filme porno. Nu, rolul tău include și un serviciu important pe care trebuie să-l faci femeilor din viața ta. Femeile cu care ai de-a face trebuie să învețe lucruri de la tine. Dacă ai suficientă minte și cauți să interacționezi cu femei cel puțin la fel de deștepte ca tine dacă nu chiar evident mai deștepte, poți să le înveți ce-nseamnă un bărbat. Nu toate știu, nu toate ajung să aibă parte de așa ceva, dar ăsta poate fi marele tău atu. Fii tu un exemplu memorabil, fă tu în așa fel încât toți flăcăii pe care i-a cunoscut sau pe care, poate, îi va cunoaște să fie mereu comparați cu tine. Nu e ușor, dar nu e nici foarte, foarte greu. Mai ales că sfaturile mele-ți sunt la dispoziție. În fine, dacă ai de-a face cu femei deștepte, poți oricând să porți și discuții serioase cu genul acesta de femei. Explică-le limpede că, vrând-nevrând, când se smiorcăie în legătură cu cine știe chestie întâlnită-n viața oamenilor în mod frecvent, acel ceva le mânjește un pic personalitatea. Acel ceva nu dispare și nici nu se rezolvă. Din contră, se lipește și mai mult de personalitatea lor. Știu, poate suna grețos pentru anumite tipe, dar rolul tău nu este să le desenezi scene idilice de viață rurală combinată cu picnick romantic. Rolul tău este să fii un pic de lider. Asta nu-nseamnă să-i spui ce să gândească, e suficient să-i sugerezi la ce să se gândească. PS apropo de media celor mai frecvente 5 interacțiuni Am spus mai sus că femeile care-și petrec timpul în companii nocive ajung să fie cam ceea ce reprezintă acele companii. Chiar am dat exemplul cu pițipoancele triste. Deși am vorbit despre femei, să știi că lucrurile sunt valabile și pentru bărbați. Nu te grăbi să-i judeci pe alții, poți să înlocuiești “pițipoance triste” cu “lăbari triști” și vezi cum stă treaba și-n cazul tău. Dacă-n cazul tău treaba chiar stă aiurea, mai limitează din interacțiunile cu tovarăși care te trag în jos, mai elimină din acestea și înlocuiește-le cu tovarăși în preajma cărora merită să te afli. Nu găsești astfel de oameni rapid? Nicio problemă, împrietenește-te cu cei care scriu cărți, de exemplu. Ce-nseamnă asta? Asta nu-nseamnă să te apuci acum să-ți faci prieteni printre membrii Uniunii Scriitorilor, ci să petreci timp citind cărți ale unor autori de la care ai ceva de învățat. În momentul în care acorzi din timpul și atenția ta unor lecturi care te ajută să te dezvolți ca om, se poate spune că-ți faci respectivii autori oarecum tovarăși și-ți crești media despre care-ți vorbeam mai devreme. Acum, nu-nțelege că vreau să ne împrietenim sau alte chestii de genul acesta. Îți pot însă face două recomandări care te pot ajuta să-ți crești acea medie despre care ți-am vorbit: Stai drept! – Ghid de Atitudine Masculină în caz că te interesează seducția Sfarmă Piatră – Transformarea, în caz că te interesează să devii cea mai bună variantă a ta.

The workmen were building a high school, blasting out the site with dynamite in the southern Chinese city of Ganzhou when they saw it: the newly exposed fossil of a small, child-sized dinosaur. It was well preserved despite the construction, and it struck a curious pose: head elevated, neck arching upward, limbs splayed out to the side. The roughly meter-long fossil, researchers say today in Scientific Reports, represents a new species of oviraptorosaur, a group of feathered, birdlike dinosaurs that rapidly diversified in the few million years before an asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Oviraptorosaurs inhabited much of the Northern Hemisphere, but they seem to have flourished in what is now Ganzhou. The new species, dubbed Tongtianlong limosus (or “muddy dragon on the road to heaven”), marks the sixth species of oviraptorosaur found in the Ganzhou area. T. limosus has slightly different skull features from its brethren, but a similarly short, deep, skull and a beak rather than teeth. Cretaceous-era Ganzhou was a hot, humid jungle with towering plants and the occasional mud pit, a richly diverse environment home to everything from duck-billed dinosaurs to long-nosed tyrannosaurs. Still, T. limosus may have met a sad end between 66 million and 72 million years ago: Its reaching neck and outstretched limbs hint at the final struggles of a creature hopelessly mired in mud.

This year, Toyota aired a Prius ad titled "The Longest Chase" during the Super Bowl. Next year, the brand won't have a Super Bowl spot, saying the game doesn't line up with key launches. The Toyota brand is sitting out the Super Bowl for the first time since 2011. The automaker said the game doesn’t line up with the launch schedules of the new Camry sedan and C-HR compact crossover. Launch activities for these vehicles likely won’t begin until late spring and summer, said Jack Hollis, group vice president of Toyota marketing at Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. The C-HR is slated for a second-quarter release, while the new Camry should hit stores in the third quarter. Hollis said the Super Bowl decision was made over the summer, so it had nothing to do with the NFL’s declining ratings this season. Lexus, meanwhile, hasn’t announced its Super Bowl plans. “The last five years, we have used the Super Bowl as a launch point for each of our new vehicle launches that are right at that time frame,” Hollis told Automotive News. “… The timing to be able to maximize the value of Super Bowl wasn’t there for us.” During Super Bowl 50, Toyota highlighted the redesigned Prius’ fun-to-drive factor in “The Longest Chase,” a 90-second spot in the second quarter. Toyota also ran a 60-second spot, “Hunters,” during the game’s post-game show that it sponsored. Hollis said the Toyota’s decision not to run a Super Bowl ad in 2017 doesn’t mean the brand is drawing back from the NFL, or sports marketing in general. The company will continue to advertise during high-visibility NFL broadcasts such as “Sunday Night Football” and “Monday Night Football” going forward. The brand is a sponsor of the Philadelphia Eagles, New York Jets, New York Giants, San Francisco 49ers, Indianapolis Colts and Seattle Seahawks. “We still believe in the Super Bowl. We think it’s a great property. We’re spending equal to, or greater on sports properties overall. Our commitment to sports and sports marketing has never been higher,” Hollis said. “Starting in January, we become the official top sponsor of the Olympics also. We continue to grow that footprint in sports.” (VIDEO):

Scaunele ergonomice sunt printre cele mai cunoscute si utilizate de catre persoanele care petrec mult timp in aceeasi pozitie, la birou sau in fata unui calculator. Insa acestea nu protejeaza in totalitate coloana. Oamenii sunt motivati sa se gandeasca la sanatate doar atunci cand apare o criza sau in prezenta unor simptome, cum ar fi durerea. De exemplu, cei mai multi oameni se duc la stomatolog doar atunci cand au o durere de dinti. La fel e si cu durerile de spate, insa rezultatele pot fi mult mai daunatoare. De ce? Pentru ca, spre deosebire de durerea de dinti, daca aveti dureri de spate problema este in curs de agravare in tacere de ceva timp (vorbim chiar de ani). Acest proces cunoscut sub numele de subluxatie, o usoara nealiniere a vertebrelor, poate duce la probleme grave de sanatate pe termen lung, disfunctii neurologice si degenerarea testurilor articulare. Acumularea de subluxatii creeaza iritatii in corpul uman si interfereaza cu transmiterea de informatii catre creier prin intermediul sistemului nervos. Sistemul nervos este controlerul central al corpului, iar coloana vertebrala protejeaza acest sistem vital. In cazul in care coloana vertebrala este afectata de o pozitie neadecvata, stres sau un sprijin neadecvat, informatiile transmise catre creier sunt limitate, iar in timp acest lucru cauzeaza dureri serioase. Subluxatiile pot aparea datorita unor traume ale coloanei, cum ar fi o cadere sau un accident, iar in ultimul timp au inceput sa apara din cauza stresului acumulat, pozitiei neadecvate sau, ati ghicit, stand la calculator toata ziua. Mentinerea unei pozitii corecte sau folosirea unui scaun de birou cu suport lombar pot ajuta din timp la evitarea unor astfel de probleme. Suportul lombar este crucial in reducerea stresului asupra corpului si al coloanei vertebrale, avand beneficii pe termen lung pentru sanatate si pentru una din esentialele parti ale corpului uman. Scaunul folosit la birou este esential sa fie intotdeauna confortabil, iar spatarul trebuie sa fie folosit cat mai mult posibil (evitati intotdeauna aplecarea inainte). Suportul lombar trebuie sa sprijine curbura naturala a coloanei vertebrale si talpile ar trebuie sa fie intotdeauna pe podea. Activ sau pasiv Exista doua tipuri diferite de sisteme de suport lombar oferite prin scaunele ergonomice corecte, care pot ajuta la realizarea unei posturi de sedere anatomica corecta, cunoscut sub numele suport lombar activ si suport lombar pasiv. Activ Suportul lombar activ este o abordare de sine statatoare, care poate fi adaugata sau construita separat pe un spatar si poate fi reglata in diferite moduri. Pasiv Suportul lombar pasiv, de obicei, este construit in cadrul scaunului si, prin urmare nu este reglabil. Cu toate acestea, acelasi sprijin poate fi realizat si in cazul in care alte caracteristici ergonomice au fost construite in scaun pentru a compensa faptul ca tipul respectiv de scaun de birou nu are un suport lombar reglabil. Alegeti-va un scaun potrivit nevoilor, pentru a reduce din stresul provocat coloanei vertebrale printr-o sedere prelungita in aceeasi pozitie.

The Red Planet is coming to your living room. On 14 November, the National Geographic Channel will broadcast its big-budget TV series MARS. It’s an unusual combination of documentary and a fictional dramatization. The real-life footage follows the company SpaceX and its chief Elon Musk as they try to develop reusable rockets—crucial technology to get to Mars—and includes interviews with scientists, astronauts, and space travel advocates. The drama tells the story of a first six-person crew arriving at Mars on the spaceship Daedalus in 2033 and surviving on the surface despite a series of mishaps. Among the team who conceived the six-part series are Academy and Emmy award–winning producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard—director of Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and The Da Vinci Code. ScienceInsider spoke with Grazer and Howard by phone from California. Their responses have been edited for clarity and brevity. Q: Why the unusual mixture of fact and fiction? Brian Grazer: We like to transport viewers to a world that is both cinematic and real—both are interesting. We love learning and it was great to get to speak with experts such as Elon Musk and get intimate with them. Ron Howard: It’s a kind of creative opportunism. It’s part documentary and part drama—almost equal parts. On a thematic level, it celebrates exploration in a visceral way. Q: Space travel is monotonous. How did you make life exciting for the fictional crew? RH: It’s reality with the boring bits snipped out. We began with a great deal of research on coping with space and dealing with the challenges. We selected a few of these to dramatize. We’re at a tipping point and a lot of individuals are working on these problems. [NASA astronaut] Scott Kelly dedicated a year on the international space station to see what that could do to a human being. Q: There are many schemes to get humans to Mars. Which did you portray? BG: We consulted with Stephen Petranek [author of How We’ll Live on Mars], SpaceX, NASA. It’s our best estimate. We tried to reflect what we’re learning. Q: Is it a one way trip for the fictional crew? RH: It varies from person to person. They are colonizing and have terraforming in mind. The immediate imperative is to survive but they want to create sustainability, to begin to build. Q: Is the series a clarion call for more Mars exploration? BG: I think it will stimulate debate, create a bridge between individuals and ideas they don’t know so well. It humanizes it, transporting people via the cinematic form. RH: I hope it will inspire as well.

Every time the plasma physicists at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, fire a shot on their fusion reactor, a big chunk of the hardware goes up in smoke. Their Z machine contains banks of capacitors that fill up with more electrical energy than a thousand lightning bolts. With the flip of a switch, 20 million amps surge toward a fuel-filled cylinder the size of a pencil eraser. The electrical current induces an overwhelming magnetic field, which pinches the tube so fast and furiously that hydrogen atoms inside fuse into helium, releasing a blast of high-energy neutrons and helium nuclei (known as a particles). The blast vaporizes the intricate hardware that holds the tiny tube—10 kilograms of solid metal. "We're basically delivering three sticks of dynamite worth of energy," says Mike Cuneo, a manager on the project. "After, there's a crater a foot wide." The physicists are now preparing to make even bigger bangs by adding a precious fuel, used in thermonuclear weapons, that carries both risks and rewards. Calculations, simulations, and experimental results published in recent years suggest that Sandia's machine could offer a quicker and cheaper path to self-sustaining fusion than other approaches that blast the fuel with lasers or trap it in reactors called tokamaks. But so far the Z machine has unleashed its fury mainly on deuterium (a hydrogen with one neutron in its nucleus), which releases limited amounts of fusion energy. In August, however, researchers added a dash of tritium—hydrogen with two neutrons. Over the next 5 years, the tests will gradually ramp up to a 50-50 blend of deuterium and tritium (DT). Fusion of 50-50 DT fuel releases 60 to 90 times as many neutrons as deuteriumonly fusion does, and each of the neutrons and α particles ejected from DT fusion carries more than four times the energy of their deuterium-only counterparts. As tritium levels in the fuel rise toward 50%, energy yields should soar. Other fusion efforts have followed the same path. In 1997, the Joint European Torus (JET), a tokamak in Abingdon, U.K., burned 50-50 DT to generate 16 megawatts of power, though for less than a second. That shot set a record for fusion power output that still stands today. But graphite in JET's reactor walls limited the output. "Carbon is like a sponge for tritium, so about 70% of the tritium we injected stuck to the wall," recalls Xavier Litaudon, who heads the ITER physics department in Oxford, U.K., and is now lobbying to extend JET's funding to include a new round of DT experiments in 2019. ITER, the overbudget and overdue international tokamak under construction near Cadarache in France, has staked its mission on eventually using DT to liberate far more power from fusion than is put in. Unlike a tokamak, which uses magnetic fields to stabilize a wispy ring of hot plasma, the Z machine relies on inertia and a magnetic cage to contain the superheated fuel during microsecondlong shots. The approach, called magneto-inertial fusion, shares more in common with fusion efforts like that at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where trillion-watt lasers zap pellets of fuel to induce fusion. Sandia and NIF scientists don't have to worry about losing tritium into graphite because unlike tokamaks, their machines have no containing walls. Moreover, Cuneo says, unlike NIF, the Z machine's magnetic field can slow emerging α particles and trap them along field lines, funneling more energy into sustaining the fusion. Sandia is one of only three fusion centers currently using DT (see table, below). One issue is cost. Tritium costs tens of thousands of dollars a gram because there is no natural repository of the stuff; it is produced in nuclear reactors as a byproduct of fission. Adding fuel to the fire Sandia's Z machine joins a small club of fusion reactors that have used deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel. Reactor Location DT fuel used Note Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor Princeton, New Jersey 1993-1997 Decommissioned OMEGA Rochester, New York 1995-present DT systems stretch back to 1979 Joint European Torus Abingdon, U.K. 1991-1997 New DT campaign planned for 2019 National Ignition Facility Livermore, California 2010-present Failed to achieve ignition with DT ITER Cadarache, France 2035 (planned) DT use delayed from 2021 to 2035 Another issue is safety. "Tritium is mildly radioactive—it has a 12-year half-life—so regulations require you to handle it very carefully," says Rich Hawryluk, a researcher at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey. What's more, the neutrons from DT fusion bang into steel parts and make them slightly radioactive. So when PPPL closed a reactor after its DT runs in the 1990s, the room-sized vessel was filled with concrete, sliced up, and buried at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state. In the presence of water, including humidity in the air, tritium can form tritiated water, which is at least ten thousand times more biologically hazardous than pure T2 gas, Hawryluk says. That is a special concern at the Z machine, which insulates electrical components in pools of oil and water. "We do not want tritium to get into those," Cuneo says. At NIF, tritium presents fewer hazards because it is contained within a tiny sphere during transport, and workers don't often enter the interior of the machine. Sandia's capsule, in contrast, is open at both ends, and the violent implosion mixes unburned tritium with vaporized metal that sprays everywhere. "People have to go in and completely replace the center of the accelerator after every shot," Cuneo says. Sandia is nevertheless moving forward with tritium, in part because it generates extra neutrons that reveal what's happening in the hottest, densest part of the short-lived plasma, where the physics is not as well understood. In three planned shots next year, Cuneo says, they will remove a tritium containment system from around the target both to test an air-purging safety system and to get a clearer view of the neutrons. "We're excited about the recent results, even though it's just a tenth of a percent tritium," he adds. "There was a barrier to belief that we could ever use tritium at all."

The voters have chosen Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States. So now it’s time for scientists to share their thoughts with the business tycoon who triumphed over both Democrat Hillary Clinton and much of the Republican party he represented in the election. There’s been almost no interaction between the science community and the campaign over the past 18 months. Most academics didn’t support Trump and never expected him to beat Clinton. Trump operatives didn’t do any outreach to the scientific establishment, and its agenda wasn’t addressed during the campaign. Last night the election results confirmed the community’s status as outsiders. “I am simply stunned,” says Neal Lane, a Democrat who led the National Science Foundation and served as White House science adviser under President Bill Clinton. “Trump’s election does not bode well for science or most anything else of value,” adds Lane, a physicist and university professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas. But now that Trump will be occupying the Oval Office for the next 4 years, researchers want him to know what they think it will take to preserve and strengthen the scientific enterprise. For many policy wonks, the list starts with picking a well-qualified science advisor and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). That person should also play a big role in filling other science-related positions throughout the government, Lane and others say. Assuming a Clinton victory, the grapevine was already buzzing with possible names who would satisfy a rumored preference for the first-ever woman and nonphysicist to serve as presidential science advisor. But some policy wonks have been quick to adjust to the new Trump reality. “In thinking about who might suit Donald Trump’s personality, a candidate close to retirement or retired from business and industry, who has the respect of the scientific, engineering, and innovation community and is interested in undertaking the challenges of public service, might be the best choice,” opines Deborah Stine, professor of the practice in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a former White House staffer under President Obama. “Bonus points if the candidate is a woman, but convincing one to serve in the administration is likely to be a challenge.” The pool of potential candidates needn’t be confined to Republicans, Stine says. “Past science advisers have not always had the same party affiliation as the president for whom they worked,” she notes, a reference to the late John Marburger, a Democrat who was science adviser to Republican President George W. Bush. Fairly or not, science politicos regard the selection of a presidential science adviser as a litmus test for what the new president thinks about their issues. And Robert Cook-Deegan, a research professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, is pessimistic about what that could mean. “For Trump, I'm not sure [the appointment] would matter, because there won't be any ‘policy’ apparatus, but only traffic cops and damage control fire brigades. Science won't get much attention, except when it gets in the way or bolsters support for a political priority.” Andrew Rosenberg, of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says scientists can’t afford the luxury of such negative thinking. “Scientists need to stand up and be heard,” says Rosenberg, a former senior official for fisheries within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “They can’t just hunker down in their labs and say that they won’t get involved because the election didn’t go the way they wanted it to.” The absence of science on the campaign trail this year was not unusual. But while Clinton crafted lengthy policy statements on any number of topics involving science and innovation, Trump’s most relevant comments can be found in brief answers to 20 questions posed by Sciencedebate.org. Investment in infrastructure? But those statements were likely written by campaign staffers and may not be a good indication of what Trump actually thinks. A better yardstick may be this morning’s victory speech, in which the only issue Trump mentions is a plan to rebuild the country’s transportation infrastructure. And many science wonks are hoping that Trump will include research and cyberinfrastructure in his definition of what needs to be upgraded. Bart Gordon, a Democrat and former chairman of the House of Representatives science committee, who retired from Congress in 2010, thinks that it might be possible to build bipartisan support for such an infrastructure bill depending on its size and how it would be paid for. Now a lobbyist with K&L Gates, an international law firm based in Washington, D.C., Gordon doesn’t expect it to be as large as the $850 billion stimulus package enacted in the first weeks of the Obama administration. That economic recovery bill contained some $20 billion for various research agencies to invest in “shovel-ready” projects. But he thinks that legislators and the White House could agree on a smaller investment in research. Such a bill would send “a strong signal about the importance of science,” says Tobin Smith, vice president for policy at the Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C. But Smith says Trump will need to do much more than that to win over a community still unhappy with the policies of the most recent Republican in the White House. “Under George W. Bush, politics increasingly seeped into major science policy decisions,” says Smith, “from the position he took on stem cell research to choosing scientific advisory committee members based on their political as views as opposed to their scientific credentials. Already wary of Trump’s support for science, the scientific community will be watching closely to see if President Trump takes similar actions or if he is able to transcend his early rhetoric to find a way to demonstrate that he will respect and take science seriously.”

It’s finally over. Come January, Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the new president, and dozens of freshly elected lawmakers will join the new Congress (the 115th). What will the election results mean for the leadership of the key agencies and congressional committees that shape U.S. science funding and policy? Here’s a quick guide to who is in, who is out, and who is not going anywhere. The Administration Typically, a new president means an entirely new cast of cabinet members and political appointees—some 4000 senior positions across the federal government. Already, President Barack Obama has said he will ask his appointees to submit resignation letters that will take effect on Inauguration Day, 20 January. That will clear the way clear for Trump to appoint his own science team, starting with a new White House science adviser and the leaders of science agencies. They include cabinet-level positions, such as the head of the Department of Energy (DOE); leaders of independent agencies including NASA; and the heads of the National Institutes of Health (part of the Department of Health and Human Services), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (which belong to the Commerce Department). All of these positions also require Senate confirmation, which can take time. By tradition, however, the head of one major science agency—the National Science Foundation (NSF)—doesn’t automatically step down when the White House gets a new occupant. Although the NSF director serves at the pleasure of the president, the job also comes with a 6-year term. That means France Córdova, who was confirmed in March 2014, might remain until the runup to the next presidential election in 2020. Speculation has already begun about who Trump might pick for most of the science leadership posts, but the campaign has offered few hard hints. And some science lobbyists wonder, given the Trump campaign's few apparent connections to the scientific community, how they will recruit candidates. "Where are they going to pull from?," asks Benjamin Corb, director of public affairs at American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in Bethesda, Maryland. "With a more establishment Republican candidate you could maybe draw back to previous adminstrations and advisers. I just don’t know where the names are going to come from ... from an agenda setting standpoint [that] is the big unknown." Rumors do abound on his possible pick of energy secretary, with several oil and gas executives reportedly in the mix, including Harold Hamm, the head of Oklahoma-based Continental Resources, a leading fracking firm. Congress Republicans maintained control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, meaning they will appoint all committee chairs, hold a majority of seats on every legislative panel, and have extensive control over what legislation comes to a vote. In the House, Republicans will control at least 236 seats, a comfortable majority (the party now has 247). In the Senate, Republicans will have a smaller edge: at least 51 seats, and at most 53. Senate Democrats have so far picked up a single seat, in Illinois, where Tammy Duckworth defeated Republican incumbent Mark Kirk. In addition, Democrats still have the possibility of picking up seats in New Hampshire (where votes are still be counted in a race between incumbent Republican Kelly Ayotte and Democrat challenger Maggie Hassan), and in Louisiana (where Republican John Kennedy will face Democrat Foster Campbell in a December runoff election). Although Republicans will continue to control the Senate, there will be changes in the leadership of some science-related legislative panels. On the Environment and Public Works committee, for example, Senate rules prevent current chair James Inhofe (R–OK)—a prominent critic of climate science—from serving another term. A likely replacement is Senator John Barasso (R–WY), who like Inhofe is a strong supporter of the fossil fuel industry. The panel’s senior Democrat, Barbara Boxer (D–CA), is retiring; many Congress watchers expect her to be replaced by Tom Carper (D–DE), an outspoken advocate for government action on climate change. One the Senate appropriations panel—which sets federal spending—the head of the subpanel that sets the budget of the National Institutes of Health survived a re-election scare. Senator Roy Blunt (R–MO) held off an unexpectedly strong challenge from Democrat Jason Kander. Blunt has been a strong supporter of spending on biomedical research. The appropriations panel will be losing its senior Democrat, Barbara Mikulski (D–MD), a strong advocate for spending on space science and other fields, who is retiring. It is not clear who will replace her; possibilities includes Senators Patrick Leahy (D–VT), Dianne Feinstein (D–CA), Patty Murray (D–WA), and Jon Tester (D–MT). In the House of Representatives, one big change will come atop the Appropriations Committee. Chair Harold Rogers (R–KY) is term-limited. His likely replacement is Representative Rodney Frelinghysen (R–NJ), who has extensive experience working on science-related budget issues. Another leadership change will occur on the House Energy and Commerce committee, where Representative Fred Upton (R–MI) is term-limited. The panel has a broad purview, including environmental issues and aspects of biomedical research. Possible replacements include Representatives Joe Barton (R–TX), John Shimkus (R–IL), and Greg Walden (R–OR). Barton led the panel from 2004 to 2007 and served as its senior Republican from 2007 to 2009, who has been a critic of the conduct federal science agencies in the past.

Some 3.8 billion years ago, Mare Orientale got started with a bang. A 930-kilometer-wide impact basin perched on the moon’s visible edge, Orientale resembles a bull’s-eye, with a smooth interior encircled by three rough rings. For decades, scientists have debated the significance of these rings, which are found around the largest impact basins on the moon, Mars, and Earth. Do any of the rings match the original crater rim left by the striking asteroid or comet? Now, a new subsurface moon map from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, published today in Science, suggests that the answer is no. Four years ago, as GRAIL’s two spacecraft neared the end of a 1-year orbital mission with a planned crash into the lunar surface, they measured Orientale from a scant altitude of 2 kilometers. At such close range, the spacecraft were exceptionally sensitive to tiny changes in the moon’s gravity caused by buried rocks of different density–giving the GRAIL team a picture of the subsurface, and a better idea of how the impact actually went down. They found that the Orientale strike hollowed out a crater some 320 to 460 kilometers wide—smaller than any of the rings. Within an hour, the crater’s steep walls toppled inward. Hot mantle rocks, rebounding in the void like the splash of a stone in water, rose up into a central tower as high as 140 kilometers. A stiffer crust, riding on top of the mantle rocks, cracked and settled to form the two outer rings. The central tower’s subsequent collapse piled up into the innermost ring. Earlier this year in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists drilled into the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub impact crater to show that a similar process occurred on Earth. Beyond settling the mystery of the rings, the GRAIL researchers expect that their map will help refine the models that connect the speed and size of impactors to the scars they leave across the solar system.

Ancient villagers on the U.K. archipelago of Orkney likely dined on food items we’d consider luxuries today: venison, oysters, crab, mussels, cod, and … voles? A group of researchers says it’s possible that these resourceful Neolithic people did not turn up their noses when roasted rodent was on the menu. Their finding—based on pits full of singed vole carcasses in the ancient village of Skara Brae (above) unearthed in the late 1970s—would make this the first evidence for rodent-eating in Neolithic Europe, scientists report this week in Royal Society Open Science. To build their case, archaeologists examined four trenches at the 5400-year-old village, full of thousands of vole and wood mouse skeletal fragments. Scientists quickly ruled out natural causes of death, because voles are known to steer clear of human settlements and because the trenches lacked any signs of burrowing. A trench within the village compound also contained more adult skeletons than any of the other pits, suggesting that villagers were selectively hunting larger animals, and treating them like protein-rich snacks, according to one of the researchers. Burn patterns on the bodies closely resemble those caused by roasting on a spit over embers, rather than incineration after decomposition, the scientists say. This became especially evident after comparing them with rodent remains from similar sites in Patagonia and South Africa, where the animals were commonly on prehistoric plates. The scientists admit that there could be other explanations for the rodent bones—the grain-farming villagers could have simply seen them as meddlesome vermin that needed to be culled—but the burn marks don’t quite fit those theories. So the researchers are sticking to their favorite hypothesis: that these skeletons are the remains of some of Europe’s first rodent barbeque dinners.

Once a year for 5 years, a crew of researchers would set sail off the coast of Cancun, Mexico, to locate frigate birds flocking and diving just above the ocean’s surface. The scientists weren’t actually interested in the birds—the animals merely served as a smoke signal for the mayhem unfolding below: sailfish ganging up on sardine schools. Sailfish hunting groups range in size from four to as many as 70, but their strategy is rather simplistic. Unlike chimpanzees, they don’t assume special roles, like cornering the prey while others look on as chimps do, and their attacks aren’t really coordinated, meaning they don’t plan their strikes based on the location of others in the group. It does, however, appear that the sailfish time their attacks: One at a time, they charge the school—rather slowly considering the high speeds they are able to reach—and use their bill, which is covered in microteeth, to rapidly slash and prod the sardines. Then they take a rest. Only 24% of attacks end in a tasty sardine snack, but 95% end in an injury to the prey, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This process ends up pummeling the school back and forth, likely causing the sardines physiological distress as well. Injured or disoriented sardines are easier to catch. Though the sailfish actually might not catch as much prey as they would hunting alone, they certainly don’t need to work as hard for it. If this energy-saving technique benefits sailfish in the long run, researchers say this could be an example of behavior that leads to more complex cooperative strategies seen in other group living animals.

Bun venit Valeriu!

The island suburb of Key Haven, Florida, is the proposed site of Oxitec’s first U.S. release of genetically modified mosquitoes.} Voters on the tiny suburban peninsula of Key Haven, Florida, will find an unusual question on their ballot on Election Day: “Are you in favor of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District conducting an effectiveness trial in Key Haven using genetically modified mosquitoes to suppress an invasive mosquito that carries mosquito-borne diseases?” Behind that question is a ferocious debate about the first proposed release of genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the United States. The biotech company Oxitec designed the mosquitoes to carry a gene that causes their offspring to accumulate a toxic protein and die before adulthood, which could reduce po[CENSORED]tions of the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmit the dengue, Zika, and chikungunya viruses. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) greenlighted the project in August, but local opposition has been so strong that the mosquito control board has held off on approving the release. The ballot referenda—one for Key Haven and another for the broader Monroe County—are nonbinding. But three of the five board members have said they will follow the voters’ decision. Oxitec has been releasing mosquitoes in other countries since 2009; the Cayman Islands, Malaysia, Brazil, and Panama have all hosted field experiments, and the company has reported greater than 90% reductions in mosquito po[CENSORED]tions in small test areas. But we don’t know everything about the mosquitoes or their potential impact. Here’s what the evidence says so far about some concerns Florida residents and mosquito experts have raised. Could a GM mosquito bite a Floridian? It’s possible. Oxitec aims to release only males, which don’t bite, but its sorting system isn’t perfect. The company says it ensures that a maximum of 0.2% of the mosquitoes released are female. Over the proposed 26-month trial, that works out to fewer than 62 females mosquitoes per person in Key Haven—2.4 mosquitoes per household per week. (Of course, it’s hard to predict how many of them will actually alight on some human skin.) Could a GM mosquito transfer genes to a human, or make them sick? It’s highly unlikely. As the agency’s environmental impact document puts it, “mosquitoes have been feeding on humans and other animals for millennia but there is no evidence of DNA transfer between mosquitoes and humans.” There’s also “negligible” risk that the GM mosquito saliva would have any toxic or allergenic effects on humans. The two unique proteins it carries—the lethal one that affects gene transcription and a fluorescent protein to distinguish it from wild mosquitoes—were undetectable in the insects’ saliva. If they’re in there, the levels are likely too low to affect us, FDA concluded. Could genes from the Oxitec strain spread to the wild mosquitoes? Yes. In lab experiments, Oxitec’s lethal gene isn’t 100% lethal. The company has reported that about 4% of offspring survived to become flying adults. That survival rate might be lower in the wild, but if the offspring live long enough and are healthy enough to mate, they will introduce genes from the lab strain into the wild po[CENSORED]tion. “That’s something that does have to be paid close attention to,” says entomologist Zach Adelman of Texas A&M University in College Station. When Oxitec stops its releases, mosquito numbers will rebound, and it is not clear whether or how the genes from the release strain would influence the recovered po[CENSORED]tion, including how mosquitos seek out hosts, mate, or lay eggs, for example. Of key concern, he says, is how good Oxitec’s strain is at transmitting viruses compared with wild mosquitoes—its so-called vector competence. So far, studies of such changes in a postrelease po[CENSORED]tion are missing, Adelman says. Simon Warner, Oxitec’s chief scientific officer in Abingdon, U.K., says there’s no reason to think their lab strain—descendants of mosquitoes collected in Cuba, crossed with a Mexican strain—would be any more dangerous than another strain of A. aegypti. “Vector competence is not a question that we’ve been asked by the [FDA] regulators,” he says. “We haven’t studied it, because we don’t think it’s a concern.” Could mosquitoes become resistant to the Oxitec strategy? Yes, if surviving larvae carried genetic variants that protected them from Oxitec’s lethal gene. For example, if a mosquito happened to inherit genes that prevent the lethal protein from accumulating in its body, or that allow it to survive high levels of the protein, these traits could get selected for over generations. That could mean that in the future, Oxitec’s releases would make less of a dent in the po[CENSORED]tion. That scenario is a “theoretical possibility,” says insect geneticist Max Scott of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, but “it wouldn’t stop me from going ahead and testing it in Florida, because I think this is a very useful technology.”

Government stockpiles of elephant tusks, like these being incinerated in Kenya, are not fueling the illegal ivory trade. The illegal trade in elephant ivory is being fueled almost entirely by recently killed African elephants, not by tusks leaked from old government stockpiles, as had long been suspected. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which relies on nuclear bomb tests carried out in the 1950s and ’60s to date elephant tusks and determine when the animal died. The findings could help efforts to halt the illegal trafficking of ivory, but they also reveal just how little is known about the criminal networks behind elephant poaching. “It’s a really important study, and shows that elephant ivory is going practically straight from where an animal was poached to the market,” says Elizabeth Bennett, a wildlife biologist and vice president for species conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City, who was not involved in the study. “It tells us that if we can stop the poaching, we can dry up the ivory pouring out of Africa.” But stopping the poaching is a tall order. Despite an international ban that prohibits the sale of ivory from elephants killed after 1989 (the seller must have a permit from the United States or foreign government verifying the age), the ivory market is thriving, largely thanks to young, low- to middle-income people in the United States and Asian countries, like Vietnam and China, who see ivory jewelry and carvings as status symbols—and who mistakenly think that buying only a small piece does not hurt elephants. To meet the demand, poachers are killing some 50,000 elephants a year, an unsustainable rate. Black market prices for ivory in China and elsewhere run about $1000 per pound. A recent survey showed that poachers slaughtered nearly 30% of East Africa’s savanna elephants from 2007 to 2014, some 144,000 animals. Poachers also killed nearly two-thirds of central Africa’s forest elephants between 2002 and 2013. Fewer than 400,000 elephants are believed to remain in 18 sub-Saharan countries. Law enforcement officials are stymied because they have not been able to crack the criminal syndicates believed to be behind the illegal trade, says Samuel Wasser, a conservation geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the study’s authors. Still, between 2002 and 2014, police and customs officials intercepted 14 large shipments of ivory in nine nations, including Kenya, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. Using DNA collected from these tusks, Wasser previously showed where the ivory came from. “In any forensics case, you need the when and the where,” says Kevin Uno, a geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and another co-author. “Now, we have both.” To get the “when,” the scientists collected ivory from the pulp cavity, or roots, of 231 tusks—the same tusks that Wasser and his colleagues had analyzed to show the “where.” An elephant’s most recently formed ivory tissues are found inside the roots of the tusk, which grows outward. Using a technique that Uno and his colleagues previously developed, the scientists measured the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in these tissues. The isotope (an atom with the same number of protons, but different numbers of neutrons), which derives from open-air nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and ’60s, remains in the atmosphere and is taken up by plants through photosynthesis. And because elephants consume plants that contain the isotope, it is also found in their bodies—including their tusks. The ivory forming in an elephant’s pulp cavity can thus provide an accurate record of the date of the animal’s death, the scientists say. More than 90% of the samples came from elephants killed less than 3 years before the ivory was seized, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many of the tusks were probably confiscated within only several months of the animals being killed. Just four tusks had a lag time of more than 5 years between the elephant’s death and the seizure; and only a single specimen came from an elephant killed about 19 years earlier. That “nullifies the idea that old ivory is being smuggled,” Uno says. “That’s a significant finding because it means that there’s no evidence for a lot of unfounded rumors, like corrupt government officials loading 747s with ivory and sending them to China,” adds George Wittemyer, a conservation biologist and elephant expert at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who was not involved in the study. Indeed, at least 21 countries have destroyed large ivory stockpiles in recent years; Kenya burned 105 tons earlier this year. But the study also points to some worrisome trends: Since 2011 the lag time has increased by 2 to 3 years, and the tusks have been getting smaller. That could mean that “fewer large animals are left, so the poachers are having a harder time filling a container,” Wittemyer says. Similarly, it reveals that ivory taken from elephants in East Africa has been moved faster than that collected in West Africa, he says, “perhaps because the West African forest elephants grow more slowly, or they’re harder to find.” Ultimately, the scientists hope their research will help law enforcement officials figure out “the strategies that the crime syndicates are using to kill elephants and ship illegal ivory,” Wasser says. Adds Wittemyer: “It adds a piece of hard data to a puzzle we’ve been trying to put together in the dark.”

The ocean’s twilight zone is a spooky place, where creatures like krill and “werewolf” plankton hunt—and hide—using only the light they themselves emit. In most seas, the zone is deep, stretching from 200 to 1000 meters beneath the surface. But new research has found that in the winter waters near Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, the zone shifts upward during the long polar night, bringing some of these creatures close to the surface. What’s more, the denizens of the zone live in distinct layers, with some dominating the upper levels and others ruling below. The findings could lead to a new understanding of polar marine ecosystems, even as they are endlessly transformed by melting sea ice. “This is a new look at the structure of the water column in the polar night,” says Edith Widder, an oceanographer and biologist who studies bioluminescence at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association in Fort Pierce, Florida. “[This] looks at the impact of one of the most important organizational principles in the open ocean, light, including the light animals make themselves.” The polar night was long considered a time of hibernation. For nearly 4 months, the sun disappears entirely; tiny animals at the base of the food chain were thought to die off or go dormant. But that thinking changed in 2007, when sonar equipment used by marine ecologist Jørgen Berge picked up on a strange signal: an echo that descended predictably during the day and rose at night. In warmer waters, a similar pattern marks the daily movement of millions of marine creatures up and down the water column. The sonar echo meant this mass migration was also happening near the poles, triggering a complete re-evaluation of Arctic ecosystems. Since 2012, Berge, at the University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway, has led annual expeditions examining everything from “werewolf” plankton to clams with internal clocks timed to an absent sun. In their dark journeys, Berge and his team discovered an unexpected abundance of bioluminescence. They began wondering where the creatures’ own light took over from the virtually nonexistent daylight and how that glow affected predator-prey relationships. But to do so, the team had to first quantify how much light was being produced—and by what. The scientists started by netting a variety of organisms, from krill to comb jellies to copepods, small crustaceans that form the base of the Arctic food chain. Then, they used a special device to measure the emitted light: an Underwater Bioluminescence Assessment Tool (UBAT), designed in part by team member Mark Moline, a marine ecologist at the University of Delaware (UD) in Newark. Like a mini vacuum cleaner, the breadbox-sized black box sucks water into a chamber and whips it, prompting the creatures inside to light up. “It measures every 1/60 of a second, so you get to see the kinetics of the actual flash,” Moline says. “Each organism emits a different signal in terms of intensity and duration. It almost looks like a Morse code or a heartbeat.” In the lab, the scientists examined 17 species and came up with distinct signals for seven of them. Then, over the course of two 3-week cruises in 2014 and 2015, they used their key to map the entire column in 20-meter increments down to 120 meters. Finally, they calculated the total bioluminescence of each level and compared it with the light that should have reached that depth from the atmosphere. The brightness from bioluminescence surpasses starlight, moonlight, and even the nearly imperceptible noontime daylight about 20 to 40 meters below the surface, they report this week in Scientific Reports. Further, dinoflagellates, microscopic creatures that can selectively photosynthesize, dominate the upper ranges, whereas copepods rule the deeper realms. “We tried to … break out who’s there and where they are and how much light are they producing,” says paper author and visual ecologist Jonathan Cohen of UD. “We put that together with where atmospheric light and bioluminescence actually flip roles.” The team’s next step is to explore the role bioluminescence plays in predator-prey dynamics. Cohen, who specializes in krill bioptics, has already mathematically modeled how far away and at what depth a keen-eyed krill can detect a predatory bird diving into the twilight zone, especially if that bird happens to be trailing a line of brightly lit dinoflagellates. The findings suggest that extra light from other creatures may save the krill from becoming an untimely snack. But the research has other ramifications. “One of the major implications of climate change in the Arctic is thinning ice and a changing light climate,” Cohen says. Sea ice blocks daylight, so less frozen ocean makes seas a brighter place, possibly posing problems for animals adapted to darkness in the polar night. “Changing the atmospheric light portion even in times of twilight will influence the role bioluminescence can play.”

This is an update to our ongoing coverage of the political purge of academia underway in Turkey in the wake of a failed coup attempt in July. In a surprise decree issued this past weekend, Turkey's government announced the firing of more than 1000 academics at public universities. Many of those fired are learning of their fate by finding themselves on a long list of names that the government released. The government also announced that it will now directly appoint the leaders of Turkey's universities. Insiders say that the government has long held de facto control over the election of university rectors, but that the new decree simply makes the government's control of academic leadership official. Turkey's Science Academy issued a statement in Turkish this week. "Allowing a central authority ... to decide on how every institution—especially universities where specialization is at the highest level—should conduct its affairs means to entrust the entire country to the supposed infallibility of a single individual in a world where economy and technology advance at an immense pace," it reads. "This goes against democracy and rationality."

When it comes to earthquakes, the kingdom of Bhutan is an anomaly. Despite being surrounded by countries regularly shaken by seismic activity, the small kingdom—nestled between India and China—has been seemingly free of large temblors over the last 500 years. Now, by piecing together historical and tectonic records, an international collaboration of European and Bhutanese researchers says it has solved the mystery. Scientists have long wondered about the apparent lack of seismic activity in Bhutan. One theory is that the region is truly aseismic, meaning that it’s incapable of producing large earthquakes. Another possibility is that the relative calm is simply an information gap, a lack of knowledge among the international scientific community about the country’s geological history. After all, Bhutan only began opening its borders to foreigners in the 1970s, and travel to the country is still restricted. To search for evidence of historical earthquakes in Bhutan, geophysicist György Hetényi of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and his collaborators examined published accounts of Bhutanese history and original documents written by monks and temple builders. “Instrumental records reflect all significant earthquakes that happen now,” he says. “But 100 years ago, we only had a few seismographs working on carbon paper rotating on cylinders and drums, so before 1900 we're better off using historical records, if there are any.” A team member and Bhutanese historian, Karma Phuntsho of the Shejun Agency for Bhutan's Cultural Documentation and Research in Thimphu, studied original historical texts—including biographies of monks—written in Classical Tibetan. One biography noted a child’s account of a large temblor in the spring of 1714: “An earthquake pulverized all houses and huts in every direction. I was sleeping beneath my mother’s bed, and when our house collapsed it killed my kind mother outright. My father and a group of other survivors dug me out from under the rubble of earth, stones, and wood the next day.” Another record, a biography of a temple builder, noted that “a major earthquake” struck the country on “the twentieth day of the third month of the Wood Male Horse year.” Taking into account potential calendar conversion errors, this date corresponds to roughly 4 May 1714. “The Earth shook about thirty times that day alone … the aftershocks continued for about a month,” according to the text. Based on these historical documents and others, Hetényi and his colleagues reconstructed that event: A large earthquake capable of destroying buildings had occurred on or around 4 May 1714. The researchers then gathered geological evidence to support the written records. They dug trenches in Bhutan to look for tectonic faults that showed evidence of movement. Hetényi and his team found that an earthquake had occurred along one fault between 1642 and 1836, and they associated this event with the 1714 earthquake. With the historical and geological data in hand, Hetényi and his team ran computer simulations on where the earthquake could have taken place, and how large it could have been. The researchers estimated that the quake’s magnitude had been between 7.5 and 8.5, comparable to the Nepal earthquake in 2015 that killed nearly 9000 people. They also determined that its hypocenter—the point of origin of the earthquake where the fault begins to rupture—fell within a strip 240 kilometers long and 70 kilometers wide. “This earthquake occurred in an area that we thought had no earthquakes,” Hetényi says. Thus it appears that Bhutan is not immune to earthquakes, and that the country’s apparent aseismicity was just an information gap, the team reported late last month in Geophysical Research Letters. “This study makes a compelling case that a significant Himalayan earthquake occurred in Bhutan in 1714,” says Susan Hough, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, who was not involved in the work. The findings also confirm that the entire area of the Himalayas is capable of producing large earthquakes like the magnitude-7.8 quake that struck Nepal in 2015. For the millions of people who live in and near Bhutan, “[we now have a] better earthquake hazard assessment of the region,” Hetényi says.

For the first time on a single chip, scientists have demonstrated all the components needed to create a quantum bridge to link quantum computers together. This stylized illustration of a quantum bridge shows an array of holes (purple) etched in diamond with two silicon atoms (yellow) placed between the holes. Credit: Sandia National Laboratories By forcefully embedding two silicon atoms in a diamond matrix, Sandia researchers have demonstrated for the first time on a single chip all the components needed to create a quantum bridge to link quantum computers together. "People have already built small quantum computers," says Sandia researcher Ryan Camacho. "Maybe the first useful one won't be a single giant quantum computer but a connected cluster of small ones." Distributing quantum information on a bridge, or network, could also enable novel forms of quantum sensing, since quantum correlations allow all the atoms in the network to behave as though they were one single atom. The joint work with Harvard University used a focused ion beam implanter at Sandia's Ion Beam Laboratory designed for blasting single ions into precise locations on a diamond substrate. Sandia researchers Ed Bielejec, Jose Pacheco and Daniel Perry used implantation to replace one carbon atom of the diamond with the larger silicon atom, which causes the two carbon atoms on either side of the silicon atom to feel crowded enough to flee. That leaves the silicon atom a kind of large landowner, buffered against stray electrical currents by the neighboring non-conducting vacancies. Though the silicon atoms are embedded in a solid, they behave as though floating in a gas, and therefore their electrons' response to quantum stimuli are not clouded by unwanted interactions with other matter. "What we've done is implant the silicon atoms exactly where we want them," said Camacho. "We can create thousands of implanted locations, which all yield working quantum devices, because we plant the atoms well below the surface of the substrate and anneal them in place. Before this, researchers had to search for emitter atoms among about 1,000 randomly occurring defects -- that is, non-carbon atoms -- in a diamond substrate of a few microns to find even one that emitted strongly enough to be useful at the single photon level." Once the silicon atoms are settled in the diamond substrate, laser-generated photons bump silicon electrons into their next higher atomic energy state; when the electrons return to the lower energy state, because all things seek the lowest possible energy level, they spit out quantized photons that carry information through their frequency, intensity and the polarization of their wave. "Harvard researchers performed that experiment, as well as the optical and quantum measurements," said Camacho. "We did the novel device fabrication and came up with a clever way to count exactly how many ions are implanted into the diamond substrate." Sandia researcher John Abraham and other Sandia researchers developed special detectors -- metal films atop the diamond substrate -- that showed the ion beam implants were successful by measuring the ionization signal produced by single ions. "Pretty cool, huh?" said Camacho. The journal Science thought so. The work is published in the current issue.

MSU researchers demonstrate how a 3-D printed model hand is used to test a fingerprint scanner for accuracy. Creating a 3-D replica of someone's hand complete with all five fingerprints and breaking into a secure vault sounds like a plot from a James Bond movie. But Michigan State University Distinguished Professor Anil Jain recently discovered this may not be as far-fetched as once thought and wants security companies and the public to be aware. Jain and his biometrics team were studying how to test and calibrate fingerprint scanners commonly used across the globe at police departments, airport immigration counters, banks and even amusement parks. Without a standard life-like 3-D model to test the scanners with, there's no consistent and repeatable way to determine the accuracy of the scans and establish which scanner is better. To test the scanners, they created life-size 3-D hand models complete with all five fingerprints using a high-resolution 3-D printer that can produce the same ridges and valleys as a real finger. "Like any optical device, fingerprint and hand scanners need to be calibrated, but currently there is no standard method for calibrating them," said Jain. "This is the first time a whole hand 3-D target has been created to calibrate fingerprint scanners. As a byproduct of this research we realized a fake 3-D hand, essentially a spoof, with someone's fingerprints, could potentially allow a crook to steal the person's identity to break into a vault, contaminate a crime scene or enter the country illegally. "Now, another application of this technology will be to evaluate the spoof-resistance of commercial fingerprint scanners. We have highlighted a security loophole and the limitations of existing fingerprint scanning technology, now it's up to the scanner manufacturers to design a scanner that is spoof-resistant. The burden is on them to tell whether the finger being placed on the scanner is real human skin or a printed material," said Jain. The study aims to design and develop standard models and procedures for consistent and reliable evaluation of fingerprint readers and is funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. "We are very pleased with this research and how it is showing the uncertainties in the process and what it can mean for the accuracy of the readers," said Nicholas Paulter, Group Leader for the Security Technologies Group at NIST and a co-author of the study. "The FBI, CIA, military and manufacturers will all be interested in this project." Along with Jain and Paulter, the study was co-authored by Sunpreet Arora, MSU doctoral student. The paper describing the design and fabrication process of 3-D whole hand models can be accessed here. It received the best paper award at the 15th International Conference of the Biometrics Special Interest Group, 2016. VIDEO: