Month: January 2017

Enlarge / The bullet closer, which has been viewed as a demonstration of dark matter. (credit: APOD)

Throughout the Universe, there are lots of signs that there's more gravity out there than there is visible matter to produce it. Over the last few decades, physicists have slowly come to the conclusion that it is not the laws of gravity that need to be changed, but rather that a massive particle is responsible for the extra gravity.

Now, it should be pointed out that this is not a whim. The distribution of dark matter describes all manner of gravitational phenomena at all scales, including some really weird things, like the Bullet Cluster. So, understandably, particle physicists and cosmologists get a bit touchy when people say that we should just modify gravity instead.

Erik Verlinde, a Dutch theoretical physicist, doesn't seem to care. The alternative title to Verlinde's talk, presented at a conference I'm attending, could be "How to piss off a room full of physicists in under 20 minutes."

It's long been a conundrum for visitors to Japan: how do you actually use the toilet? For more than 35 years, the "washlet"—also known in some parts as the "super toilet"—has baffled the unwary traveller with its incredibly confusing array of additional functions.

Each of these space-age super toilets comes with a panel of buttons festooned with inscrutable icons. Press the wrong one and you can easily end up with a sharp jet of cold water at an uncomfortable angle, or even an unexpected blow-dry for your junk. What makes the whole affair exponentially more confusing is the fact that, until now, the makers of these Swiss army-knife commodes couldn't agree on a way to standardise the images they put on the buttons.

Ahead of the forthcoming Tokyo Olympics in 2020, however, with a massive influx of tourists and their bowel movements expected in the country, the manufacturers have reached a consensus. At a press conference on Tuesday, representatives from the nine companies that make up Japan's Sanitary Equipment Industry Association unveiled eight new symbols to accompany the various key functions for each new loo. Models released from April this year will all be standardised, and the manufacturers hope it might even become an international standard.

Enlarge / A selection of child and infant pot burials from an ancient cemetery in Adaïma, Egypt. They are between 7,500-4,700 years old. Note that some of the pots are distinctly egg-shaped. (credit: Béatrix Midant-Reynes, Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale)

Around 3,500 BCE, the ancient Egyptians began to practice a ritual that has long perplexed archaeologists. They buried their dead in recycled ceramic food jars similar to Greek amphorae.

For decades, scholars believed that only the poor used these large storage containers, and they did so out of necessity. But in a recent article for the journal Antiquity, Ronika Power and Yann Tristant debunk that idea. They offer a new perspective on pot burial.

Burial in pots took many forms. Egyptians buried their dead in all types of ceramic vessels, and, sometimes, the body was simply placed underneath a pot in a grave. Though pot burials were popular, especially for children, people also used coffins and even stone-lined pits to inter their loved ones. The practice of pot burial probably came to Egypt from the Levant region, where pot burials date back to at least 2,000 years before the first known examples in Egypt.

Jonathan Gitlin

For a while now, racing games have been pretty good. Good enough to be of value as practice tools for those of us going to the track for real, and even as a tool to find fresh talent like the long-running Nissan Playstation GT Academy. But as plenty of readers have mentioned in the comments, if you want real accuracy, you need to ditch the console and move to the PC. You need something like iRacing. Even then, sitting at your desk with a wheel and pedals will only take you so far.

Enter CXC Simulations.