A Monitoring System on Top of a Hawaiian Volcano
In today's edition: the Tetris effect, the fragile web, what might happen to the Space Station, climate science history, and the smell of lactones.
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1. A reconsideration of the Tetris effect.
"He found that students who were made to play Tetris reported, quite consistently, that they saw Tetris pieces floating down in front of their eyes as they were going to sleep. Stickgold also included five amnesiacs in the experiment who could play Tetris just fine, but due to a specific brain damage, couldn't later recall playing it. But they, too, said that they saw blocks floating or turning on their side—even though they couldn't explain the origin of those shapes. One patient, for example, reported seeing "images that are turned on their side. I don't know what they are from. I wish I could remember, but they are like blocks."
"When they first lent support to Sept. 11 Digital Archive, the Sloan Foundation challenged creators to consider 'what historians fifty years from now would want to know about the September 11 event to … construct a full historical narrative of what transpired.' While that challenge informed the methodology of the Sept. 11 Digital Archive, the nature of digital tools might prevent future visitors from accessing materials. Even today, I had difficulty viewing some materials. In fact, the Kill Bin Laden game I described at the top of this piece would not play in my default Web browser. In the future, barriers to entry will likely increase. This problem is not unique to the Sept. 11 Digital Archive. Rather, the Sept. 11 Digital Archive registers a challenge for both print and online repositories: They do not sustain themselves."
3. The Space Station's endgame.
"Then there's just the usual problem of technological obsolescence. 'The computers are already kind of outdated,' says Daniel Huot, a NASA public affairs officer. 'A lot of people rip on us for still using Windows XP on a couple of things.' But he added that the electronics that the astronauts usually interface with are updated on a semi-regular basis. The ISS's Internet connection could also be an annoyance in future. 'The station's primary objective is to perform science, but if you look at today's experiments--compared to 15 years ago, and compared to where we're gonna be in another 15 years--require much more data to come back down to the ground,' says Cothran. 'We're going to need more bandwidth.'"
4. A pocket history of climate science.
"For decades, the greenhouse effect seemed distant and of little concern — until the mid-1950s, when Roger Revelle, Hans Suess and Charles David Keeling started to notice rising carbon dioxide levels. They weren't quite sure just how to measure them accurately until Keeling established a monitoring system on top of a Hawaiian volcano. The scientists figured it would take a decade or so before they could see a trend, but the increase was so steady that it was noticeable in just 18 months, said NASA historian Erik Conway. Revelle then pushed for carbon dioxide concerns to be included in the 1965 environmental report from the president's science advisers. They were, albeit near the end."
5. Get to know your smell families: meet the lactones.
"There are many types of lactones, each with a slightly different structure and a slightly different smell. The peachy penguin smell we sampled first was a ten carbon lactone—decalactone (from deca-, Greek for the number ten, and lactone, from the Latin for milk). Add just one carbon atom to the mix and the smell changes. This undecalactone has the same creamy sweetness as its ten-carbon cousin but it smells lighter, brighter, and fruitier. Add one more carbon to get dodecalactone and the smell changes again: sweet and unctuous, with a deeper caramel and coconut tonality."
On Fusion: The forum thread about slang that may very well never end.
1. braindecoder.com 2. slate.com | @williamfenton 3. popsci.com 4. abcnews.go.com 5. gingobioworks.com
A Monitoring System on Top of a Hawaiian Volcano