Month: January 2017

(credit: LG)

In the past few years, products at CES have increasingly focused on putting the Internet in everything, no matter how "dumb" the device in question is by nature. It's how we've ended up with stuff like this smart hairbrush, this smart air freshener, these smart ceiling fans, or this $100 pet food bowl that can order things from Amazon.

Now that phenomenon is reaching its logical endpoint: during the company's CES press conference today, LG marketing VP David VanderWaal says that "starting this year" all of LG's home appliances will feature "advanced Wi-Fi connectivity." One of the flagship appliances that will make good on this promise is the Smart Instaview Refrigerator, a webOS-powered Internet-connected fridge that among other things supports integration with Amazon's Alexa service.

Alexa isn't an inherently bad fit for a refrigerator, which like the Amazon Echo itself can just sit in the corner of your kitchen awaiting your command. The main problem there is that LG hasn't announced how much this fridge will cost; it's almost certainly going to be more than the cost of adding an Amazon Echo to your current kitchen setup or even the cost of an Echo plus a new dumb fridge that just sits there and keeps food cold without connecting to your network. Other potentially useful additions include "stickers and tags" you attach to specific items in the fridge to denote what food is stored where and when it expires, which lets the fridge generate alerts when foods are close to spoiling. A wide-angle camera mounted inside the fridge lets you look inside your fridge remotely just in case you think you left something off your grocery list.

Enlarge / A research vessel drops off a float that will make measurements as it drifts. (credit: Olivier Dugornay/IFREMER)

When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) updated its global temperature dataset to include revisions to the underlying databases, US House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX) somehow knew that the scientists had done it wrong. In fact, he accused them of having “altered temperature data to get politically correct results.”

How could he know that? Well, Rep. Smith rejects the conclusions of climate science—like the fact that the Earth’s climate is warming. Despite the slight up and down wiggles of the estimated annual temperatures, the warming of the last couple decades increased ever so slightly in NOAA's new analysis. To Smith, the result was a red flag. Suddenly he wanted to see the researchers’ e-mails and echoed the accusations of contrarian blogs about scientists’ supposedly nefarious adjustments to sea surface temperature measurements.

The update to NOAA's dataset was really pretty subtle. (credit: Karl et al./Science)

Rather than invoking scientific conspiracies, issues like this should be settled by analyzing the data. A new study, led by University of California Berkeley’s Zeke Hausfather, does just that—and Rep. Smith won’t like these results, either.

Enlarge / Roberto Vittori, attired in a training version of his shuttle launch and entry suit, in 2010. (credit: NASA)

Roberto Vittori is no stranger to noise or excessive vibrations. A former astronaut, he rode a rocket into space three times—a remarkable number of flights for an Italian-born astronaut. While in space, he coped with, at times, uncomfortable background noise levels on the International Space Station, where dozens of fans move air around, and pumps and electronics constantly whir.

Following his retirement from NASA after riding the penultimate shuttle flight into space in 2011, Vittori moved to the Washington DC area, where he now works on space policy issues. He found a home near Georgetown University that was perfect... except for the fact that it was located five miles from Reagan National Airport.

Since then Vittori's life has become a waking nightmare due to aviation noise, something like a verse from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas: "And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise! That's one thing he hated! The NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!"

Enlarge / J Calvin Coffey (credit: University of Limerick)

For more than a century, doctors have regarded the folds of flesh that hold our intestines in place as snippets of an elaborate support structure—convoluted, but not much to talk about. Yet when a pair of Irish researchers took a closer look recently, they found that it’s actually one continuous fatty membrane, possibly constituting a whole new functional organ: the mesentery.

If the reclassification gets adopted by the medical field at large, it would bring the human body’s organ tally to 79 (by most counts).

A digital representation of the small and large intestines and associated mesentery. Credit: J Calvin Coffey, D Peter O’Leary, Henry Vandyke Carter.

The mesentery, a ruffled and folded flap around the intestines, reaches from the base of the stomach down to the rectum. For support, it latches to the abdominal wall and the area of the backbone. Its most obvious purpose is to keep our guts from slipping and sliding around. But, the Irish researchers, J Calvin Coffey and D Peter O'Leary of the University of Limerick, suggest that the new organ may have other roles, including shuttling white blood cells around the intestines.