Archive for October, 2009

The Witness Protection Program, or the Witness Security Program, was established in 1970 to protect government witnesses before, during and after a trial. Learn more about witness protection in this episode of Stuff You Should Know.

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You Asked: What would happen if the Earth stood still for one full minute? — Balasubramaniam, Mumbai, India Marshall Brain Answers: Right now the earth is rotating one revolution every 24 hours. That doesn’t seem like much – it is only 0.0007 RPM. But the earth has a huge circumference. If you were to tie [...]

You Asked: How does cap and trade work? — Joan, Mobile, Ala. Marshall Brain Answers: The idea behind “cap and trade” legislation is to try to control something, usually a pollutant. So in the United States we are trying to cut the amount of carbon dioxide that we, as a nation, send into the atmosphere. [...]

Thanks a bunch to Mr. Rob Sheppe for sending along a link to a recent article in New Scientist about a prediction that in the future women will be shorter, plumper and have better tickers than they do now. The prediction was made by a Yale evolutionary biologist named Stephen Stearns, who looked at medical histories from what is arguably the most intensive and sweeping study every carried out in the history of the whole wide world, the Framingham Heart Study.

Back in 1948, a very clever person named Dr. Thomas Dawber thought it might be a good idea to begin a study that followed the residents of a single town in Massachusetts called Framingham. The extensive longitudinal study has been ongoing since then and it’s yielded a wealth of information about things like cardiovascular disease, smoking habits, dementia, hearing disorders and, now, a snapshot of evolution at work.

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What Comes After Hard Drives? – “According to a new study, if HDDs continue to progress at their current pace, then in 2020 a two-disk, 2.5-inch disk drive will be capable of storing more than 14 TB and will cost about $40 (today, a typical 500 GB hard drive costs about $100)…” Monster shark spreads [...]

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Facial recognition is getting more and more popular in electronic devices. For example, many digital cameras can now recognize faces in a scene, and some will even recognize a smile and snap a picture automatically when they see one. Now facial recognition is being put to good use in TVs to save big money on [...]

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When I was in elementary school, after years of trick-or-treating in a Wicked Witch of the West costume, I decided to be a vampire for Halloween. With the very silly exceptions of Bunnicula and Grandpa and Lily Munster, vampires were monsters back then, and monsters were what Halloween was for. I ran around in a cape, plastic fangs and a drawn-on widow’s peak, hollering, “I van to suck your blood.” Because that’s what vampires do.

Rather, that’s what vampires did. Now it seems like the average vampire has, for one reason or another, decided to abstain from drinking blood. Monsters are still what Halloween is for, though, so I’m going to spend this week looking at these abstinent vampires (and whether they’re still at all monstrous).

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In Friday’s How-to Stuff, Cristen gave us a pretty interesting fun fact when she revealed that the most common source of head pain is ice cream — that was certainly news to me. But when I get a pain in the brain, ice cream is more likely to be a possible cure than a probable cause. So for those of us who don’t experience brain freeze, how are we to tell one headache from another? It’s important to know what kind of headache you’re treating before you start popping the pills.

Here’s my own fun fact for the day: about 90 percent of so-called sinus headaches are actually migraines, according to WebMD. While sinus infections can cause headaches, it’s pretty rare, and sinus headaches aren’t recognized as an “official” headache by the International Headache Society. I know that I was taught that if I had pain in my cheeks and at the front of my head, it was a sinus headache, but it turns out that 50 percent of migraines involve pain in that area as well, according to CBS.

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The Air Force is getting ready to launch a mini robot shuttle-like space airplane, and no one will say why: Air Force’s Secretive Space Plane Nears Maiden Voyage You would think that an unpiloted space plane built to rocket spaceward from Florida atop an Atlas booster, circle the planet for an extended time, then land [...]

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The Drake equation tries to predict how many “advanced civilizations capable of radio astronomy” there might be in our galaxy and other galaxies. Here’s a great introduction to how the equation works: As demonstrated, the Drake Equation multiplies these values together: 1) The total number of stars in our galaxy: 400,000,000,000 2) Percentage of those [...]

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