Month: August 2017

Google CEO Sundar Pichai. (credit: Sam Churchill)

Google has fired James Damore, an engineer who wrote a controversial essay arguing that the company has gone overboard in its attempts to promote diversity. Damore confirmed the firing in an e-mail to Bloomberg.

“At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership,” Damore wrote in an internal posting that went viral within the company over the weekend. The posting was subsequently leaked to Gizmodo. However, he argued, that’s “far from the whole story.”

Biology is partly responsible for differences between men and women, Damore wrote, and “these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”

Enlarge / The “driverless car” in question looked similar to this one—it was a 2017 Ford Transit Connect. (credit: Ford)

The video opens with a guy rapping on the window of a van.

"Brother, who are you?" the person holding the camera says. "What are you doing? I'm with the news, dude."

You can see hands holding the steering wheel from the bottom, but the man inside the Ford van, dressed in a full driver's seat costume—including a face mask—doesn't react.

Enlarge / The CT scan reveals the wire (small white line in center) that was causing the woman’s abdominal pain. (credit: BMJ Case Reports)

Years after straightening teeth, the thin metal wires from orthodontic braces can end up twisting intestines, according to a report published Monday in BMJ Case Reports.

Australian doctors found a seven-centimeter bit of dental brace wire in the bowels of an otherwise healthy 30-year-old woman. She told doctors she had her braces removed 10 years earlier and didn’t recall swallowing or missing any bits of wire.

The case seemed to flabbergast her doctors. Most of the time, if an inert foreign object reaches a person’s intestines, it can pass the rest of the way without a problem. But things that do end up getting stuck tend to do so at the sphincter muscle valve that separates the small and large intestines. In the case of the woman in Australia, the wire was caught tearing up and twisting the middle of her small intestine.

Enlarge (credit: Lawrence Livermore National Lab)

In a lot of ways, stars are our model for creating nuclear fusion here on Earth, with fusion power often promoted as "harnessing the power of the Sun." For all that, however, we have some surprising gaps in our understanding of what's going on inside stars. That's partly because we must infer what's going on there based on the elements and particles that reach the solar surface, and partly because finding ways to test our theoretical models of fusion reactions is so difficult.

So there's a certain appealing symmetry about a paper that was released by Nature Physics today. In it, researchers describe using the National Ignition Facility, built to study fusion using a giant laser, as a model for the interior of heavy stars. The results show that, despite their limitations, our earlier efforts to understand stellar fusion were on the right track.

Cross checking the cross-section

On a simple level, most stars fuse hydrogen to form helium. But things are obviously more complex than that. Most of the hydrogen in our Sun is the lightest form, with just a single proton as its nucleus. The helium produced in stars has two protons and two neutrons. Obviously, making helium from only protons requires a series of nuclear reactions, each with distinct probabilities of occurring that depend in part on the conditions inside the star. Complicating matters further, there are some other possible reactions that don't lead directly to helium but can still occur inside a star, producing things like heavier isotopes of hydrogen.