Month: December 2017

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

The Cosmic Microwave Background was created as the first atoms formed hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang, and it retains information about the formation of the Universe. Discovering it existed confirmed a key prediction of the Big Bang Model and won its discoverers a Nobel Prize. Another Nobel went to the team behind the Cosmic Background Explorer, which gave us our first look at some of the details of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), providing support for the idea that the Universe underwent a period of inflation.

In some ways, these were baby steps on the route to understanding the Universe. The real leap came from lesser-known hardware with an awkward name: the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP. By giving us the first detailed look at the CMB, WMAP answered everything: the age of the Universe, what it's made of, its geometry, and more.

Over the weekend, the team behind WMAP was honored with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which gave us the opportunity to talk to one of its lead scientists, Princeton's David Spergel.

Enlarge / A promotional page shows Nintendo's New Super Mario Bros. Wii alongside a selection of other Nvidia Shield TV content in China. (credit: JD.com)

Nvidia's Shield set-top TV box launches in China today with the same kinds of Android-based games and video-streaming capabilities familiar to owners in the West. But that foreign launch also comes with an unexpected addition exclusive to the new market: remastered, 1080p HD version of select Nintendo Wii games.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and the Wii version of Punch-Out!! are all available to Chinese Shield TV owners for 68 RMB (about $10), with Super Mario Galaxy "coming soon," according to a press release and introductory trailer.

This marks the first time in decades that direct ports of major first-party Nintendo games have appeared on hardware not made by Nintendo. It's also the first official HD remastering for some of these 480p Wii games anywhere in the world (though Twilight Princess previously got the HD treatment on the Wii U). And the Shield TV titles mark Nintendo's first effort to bring its home console games to mainland China since the Nintendo iQue Player, which got around China's early 2000s ban on game consoles by playing only a handful of N64 titles.

Enlarge / Los Angeles, California—April 14, 2015: Anna Audis, 10, and Monica Van Stelton with her children join other parents and teachers who oppose efforts to end the personal belief exemption on vaccinations rally. (credit: Getty | Irfan Khan)

For years, doctors and health experts have tried in vain to douse the modern anti-vaccine movement with data and science. They’ve showered vaccine-hesitant parents with data on the safety and efficacy of the life-saving injections, plus information on herd immunity and the dangers of otherwise bygone diseases, such as measles. Nevertheless, the efforts largely fail. In some cases, they even backfire; mind-boggling studies have found that repeating myths and misinformation in the process of debunking them can actually reinforce them.

For a new tactic, public health researchers have turned away from facts and reason and toward morals and values. They hypothesized that if they can pitch vaccines in a way that gives anti-vaccine parents all the right feels, they may finally quench the insidious and deadly movement. And indeed, in a preliminary study, they found evidence that vaccine-averse parents have differing moral foundations than those who embrace vaccines.

In the initial study of 1,007 parents, researchers found that the most vaccine-hesitant parents were twice as likely as low-hesitancy parents to place high value on ideals of "purity" and "liberty." Those are two of six value categories in the Moral Foundation Theory, which social psychologists developed years ago to untangle people’s moral judgments and decisions based on emotional or intuitive processes—not data and science.