Bag of Beans

This article explains why some hypothermia victims undress themselves even as they freeze to death.

Shunting blood to your core and away from your extremities is accomplished through vasoconstriction of your peripheral circulation. This allows the outer portions of your body to become better at insulating your core, since it is losing less heat to the outside world.

And now the key to what causes paradoxical undressing. Vasoconstriction occurs when the smooth muscles within the vasculature contract. This effort requires a steady input of energy in the form of glucose from the body’s energy stores. However, due to a lack of blood now traveling to these muscles, they eventually tire. As the muscles of the constricted blood vessels run out of energy, they fatigue, relax, and open up. This is known as vasodilation.

With vasodilation of the blood vessels, an infusion of warm blood from the core of the body rushes into the peripheral extremities. This causes the hypothermia victim to feel overly warm and to start shedding layers of clothing, contrary to the reality that their body temperature is continuing to drop.

• Link (via Digg)

Related:

• James Kim found deceased

Not really surprising, but playing action games can help improve your visual processing abilities.

In an article to be published in Psychological Science, they have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.

In essence, playing video game improves your bottom line on a standard eye chart.

• Link (via Digg)

This computer-controlled waterfall is simply stunning.

• Link (via Digg)

Check out this huge aquarium in the lobby of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Berlin.

Combined with a vast amount of sandblasted glass, the giant AquaDom gives a transparent-like feeling to the lobby. Guests and visitors are able to travel through the aquarium in a glass-enclosed elevator to reach a sightseeing point and restaurant under the glass roof. Two full-time divers are responsible for the care and feeding of the fish and maintenance of the aquarium.

• Link (via Neatorama)

Astronomers have discovered a star that is composed of diamond.

The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallised white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon.

For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently.

The white dwarf is not only radiant but also rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations.

“By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth.

“We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy’s largest diamond,” says Metcalfe.

• Link (via Neatorama)

This is a creative way to create fractal images using Christmas ornaments.

It’s a little easier to see the images of the camera lens in this photo. Look at the three Cantor sets formed by the number of reflections of the camera lens on the three spheres. Math in action!

• Link
• Photoset on flickr

This is an interesting biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head physicist on the Manhattan Project. Note that this is quite a long article.

The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim’s breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new “gadget,” as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb—a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki—brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

A Damn Interesting article on what would really happen to a human body exposed to hard vacuum.

As is true with many subjects, this representation in popular culture does not reflect the reality of exposure to outer space. Ever since humanity first began to probe outside of our protective atmosphere, a number of live organisms have been exposed to vacuum, both deliberately and otherwise. By combining these experiences with our knowledge of outer space, scientists have a pretty clear idea of what would happen if an unprotected human slipped into the cold, airless void.

• Link

This is a fascinating article on traffic patterns and how the habits of a single driver can help cure traffic jams. The article spans several pages, but it is well worth the read.

I live in Seattle and my two daily commutes last about 45 minutes. (That’s when I’m lucky; sometimes it’s more like two hours each.) This has given me an immense amount of time for watching the interesting patterns in the cars. Boredom led me to fantasize about the traffic being like a flowing liquid, with cars acting as giant water molecules. Over many months I slowly realized that this was not just a fantasy. Why had I never noticed all the “traffic fluid dynamics” out there? Once my brain became sensitized to it, I started seeing quite a variety of interesting things occurring. Eventually I started using my car to poke at the flowing traffic. Observation eventually leads to experimentation, no? There are amazing things you can do as an “amateur traffic dynamicist.” You can drive like an “anti-rubbernecker” and erase slowdowns created by other drivers. But first, some basic phenomena.

I believe this is a video of the incident mentioned in the article, where several students organized a protest of the low speed limit. They created a rolling barrier across the highway, forcing everyone behind them to drive the speed limit!

• Link (via reddit)

Make Magazine has posted a great list of open source hardware and software for Makers.

There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy - but a lot of time you actually don’t own it, you can’t improve upon it, you can’t share it or make it better, you certainly can’t post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we’ve put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source. Some are kits, some are open software projects that you’ll need to build hardware for before gifting, and some are just support for the projects/groups that do open source. Included in this guide are things you can get from the MAKE store too (we try and have as many open source goods as possible).

• Link

This BMW commercial features some pretty amazing wind-powered kinetic sculptures.

• Link (via Digg)

Take this online test to see how well you can distinguish musical pitches and tones.

While working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, I developed a quick online way to screen for the tonedeafness. It actually turned out to be a pretty good test to check for overall pitch perception ability. The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct. Give it a try!

…

The test you are about to take was used as a screening test to roughly characterize patient’s pitch discrimination and musical memory abilities. Even though musical memory is strongly tested here, we have found that people who are tonedeaf tend to have normal musical memories.

• Link (via Digg)

A 17-year-old amateur scientist has built his own Fusor.

In the basement of his parents’ Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren’t privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build — a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.

…

In fact, on www.fusor.net, the Stoney Creek senior is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion. So, how does he do it?

Pointing to the steel chamber where all the magic happens, Thiago said on Friday that this piece of the puzzle serves as a vacuum. The air is sucked out and into a filter.

Then, deuterium gas — a form of hydrogen — is injected into the vacuum. About 40,000 volts of electricity are charged into the chamber from a piece of equipment taken from an old mammogram machine. As the machine runs, the atoms in the chamber are attracted to the center and soon — ta da — nuclear fusion.

• Link (via Slashdot)
• The Radioactive Boy Scout is a gripping account of another teen who almost succeeded in building a much more dangerous breeder reactor without anyone’s knowledge.

A physical explanation of the benefits of flying in formation.

The majority of the benefit goes to the birds further aft, but the front bird does still gain some reduction in drag. The presence of the two birds flanking the leader helps to dissipate the downwash off the lead bird’s wingtips and reduces the induced drag this bird experiences. These two flanking birds also benefit from a similar reduction in drag if outboard birds flank them as well. In other words, the birds in the middle of each of the lines forming the V are in the best position. These birds benefit from the upwash off the lead birds as well as off the trailing birds. This additional bonus means that birds in the middle experience less drag than either the lead bird or the bird at the end of each line.

• Link (via Neatorama)

A Damn Interesting article on the life a child prodigy.

He sidestepped imprisonment thanks to his parents’ influence, but they confined him to their summer home in California for a year after the event. Embittered, William moved back to the east coast in an effort to retreat from the press, his parents, and his talents– all of which he regarded as blights. He took up a series of menial jobs working as a clerk and a bookkeeper, moving to a new employer whenever his identity was discovered. “The very sight of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill.” he once said, “All I want to do is run an adding machine, but they won’t let me alone.” On one occasion Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway Company hired him and handed him a stack of blueprints and statistics in the hopes that he could improve their system; he was reduced to tears at the prospect of the computations, and quit the new job on his first day.

• Link

Seed magazine has a great first-hand account of a cognitive neuroscientist who used the very techniques he studies to make his way up to the million-dollar question on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?

Boston University’s doctoral program in cognitive neuroscience prepares students for a career in brain modeling, robot design, or biomedical engineering—or for winning cash on the television quiz show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?. Researchers in my department, Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS), seek to understand the brain’s mechanisms, including three cognitive systems that happen to be essential for a profitable performance on Millionaire: learning, memory, and decision-making. This summer—the start of my final year in the CNS Ph.D. program—I decided to apply my graduate skills to a decidedly practical purpose and auditioned for a turn in the show’s perilous hot seat.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Another list of tech innovations of the past year.

The world is better in 100 different ways this year. On these pages you’ll find a collection of the year’s most stunning innovations. The future is now–and it looks good.

• Link (via Digg)

This is a visual guide to lock picking in comic book format. This guide is easier to read than the classic MIT Guide to Lock Picking.

Locksport International is proud to provide a simple, visual guide to lock picking. It is our hope that beginners will find this useful in learning the basic skills of picking pin tumbler locks.

• Link (via hack a day)

Time’s list of their favorite inventions of the year.

• Link (via Digg)

Wired has posted an article that explains why lithium-ion batteries explode, and what might replace them in the future.

But such technical excuses sidestep the fact that flammability and heat intolerance are long-standing problems that have plagued Li-ion batteries since they were invented almost 30 years ago. And as devices have gotten smaller in size but richer in features, things have only worsened. Forced to produce more energy in less space, Li-ions die faster (as early iPod owners found when their batteries wore out long before their players did), and their propensity for thermal runaway greatly increases.

• Link (via Digg)