Month: December 2016

Enlarge / Look at the size of that head. (credit: flickr user: Mike Ramos)

Humans have a relatively hard time giving birth. Compared with other species, human newborns are large for their birth canal. This means that humans face the surprisingly high risk of our babies getting stuck during labor—which can be fatal for the mother, the newborn, or both. Some estimates suggest it occurs in as much as six percent of births worldwide.

The fact that this is an ongoing problem for our species has been a puzzle for evolutionary scientists. Why have evolutionary pressures not pushed the species away from such a common and fatal situation? According to an international research team including biologists, a philosopher, and a pediatrician, the answer lies in a complicated push and pull of several evolutionary factors between the baby and mother. But, the researchers find that there's also a chance for us humans to tip our own evolutionary scales—with C-sections. Using a mathematical model, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers find that, in time, modern medicine could nudge human evolution off course, delivering bigger babies.

Falling off a cliff

To begin with, the sticking point is that there are competing evolutionary pressures for both the mother and the newborn, according to the study authors led by biologist Philipp Mitteroecker at the University of Vienna, Austria. Humans have big brains, which is a great thing, and you’re more likely to survive in life if you have a big brain (and a high birth weight). However, you’re more likely to survive birth if you’re small enough to fit through the birth canal. This means that the evolutionary pressures operating over an entire population push in the direction of larger babies—until suddenly, large becomes too large and the survival rate plummets.

Enlarge / Artist's impression of a star like the Sun circling in towards a supermassive black hole, being torn apart by its tidal forces. The distortion around the black hole's edges is due to light from background stars being bent by the black hole's immense gravity. (credit: ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser)

In late May of 2015, scientists noticed something twice as bright as the brightest known supernova ever seen. Researchers initially thought the object, which they dubbed “ASASSN-15lh,” was probably a supernova—and the most luminous yet.

That startling discovery attracted the interest of the astrophysics community, and an international team continued observing the source for the next ten months. The team used an impressive array of ground- and space-based telescopes, including the Very Large Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, the New Technology Telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Over that time they’ve seen it exhibit some weird behavior for a supernova—so weird, in fact, that they’ve now concluded it’s probably not a supernova at all.

Instead, the pattern of 15lh's changing temperature over time, its location in a distant galaxy, as well as some other factors, convinced the researchers that the bright flash was probably caused by a star being torn apart and spaghetti-fied. Its dazzling destruction is thought to be thanks to the incredible tidal forces from a nearby supermassive black hole, which has more than 100 million times the Sun’s mass. (Its mass is implied from that of its host galaxy, as a galaxy’s mass is proportional to that of its supermassive black hole).

Enlarge (credit: Faraday Future)

Faraday Future, set to reveal its first production model at CES in just under a month, has left little doubt as to its ambition with its latest teaser video. The company no doubt hopes to avoid a repeat of last year's underwhelming visit to Las Vegas, when hordes of tech journalists expecting a Tesla rival found a concept car instead. Leading up to this year's event, the company has been setting expectations with a series of short teasers of a camouflaged prototype car in testing. The most recent shows us that Faraday is aiming high, with the new EV benchmarked against Bentley, Ferrari, and Tesla.

That means we can probably forget the idea of Faraday Future exploiting some new niche in the EV marketplace. No, we think the new electric SUV is gunning straight for the Tesla Model X, a vehicle that's both bonkers-fast and also rather practical. And we think the inclusion of Bentley's Bentayga as another rival means a more upmarket interior than the rather barebones Tesla.

However, we still don't even know the name of the production car, nor an expected price, how long it will take to charge, or pretty much anything concrete. And although we asked for a sneak-peek before CES, it seems like everyone else we shall have to wait until January 3rd to find out the answers to those questions.

You can check out any time you'd like, but you can never... well, you know the song. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Even under the best of circumstances, trying to get a refund from a cable company can be a trying ordeal. But when a small condo association in Florida was inadvertently billed $2,000 by Comcast, an obvious mistake that should have been solved with a quick refund became a months-long bureaucratic nightmare.

The Riggs Landing Condo Association, a nine-unit development in Sarasota, Florida, had been paying for TV service since 1990 under a series of bulk contracts with Comcast and predecessor companies. The latest 10-year deal with Comcast was due to expire at the end of 2016, but at the beginning of this year, Comcast agreed to let Riggs Landing opt out of the deal early.

“In reference to your inquiry about termination of the bulk cable service at Riggs Landing, we can de-bulk the residents effective April 1, 2016,” a Comcast employee told the association in an e-mail on January 22. The condo association then sent Comcast a letter via certified mail to complete the early termination and received a receipt confirming that it was delivered to Comcast on March 1.

Enlarge / John Grunsfeld, then the associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, speaks at a Mars conference in October, 2015.

NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission has always been a bit of an ugly duckling. It was not out of love that the space agency came up with the plan to scoop a small boulder off the surface of an asteroid and bring it back to a location near the Moon. Rather, after President Obama’s call to have humans visit an asteroid in the mid-2020s, this was the only way NASA could afford to meet such a mandate.

Since the mission’s formulation, Congress has generally dismissed sending astronauts to fly formation with a small boulder around the Moon as a stunt. Many planetary scientists, too, have never really embraced the plan, uncertain of its value when NASA already was flying a robotic sample return mission to an asteroid, OSIRIS-REx.

The aerospace community generally believes the Trump administration will sweep aside the asteroid mission in the coming months. Further confirmation of this came in late November from House Science Committee chairman and Trump ally Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who sent a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden asking critical questions about the mission, claiming it was “thrust upon NASA,” by the Obama administration and supported by “farcical studies.”