Making Science More Better For You on 09/21/07

Her parents must be so proud

MIT Student Arrested For Fake Bomb At Logan
Police Say She Had Circuit Board, Wiring, and Play-Doh

(WBZ) BOSTON An MIT student with a fake bomb strapped to her chest was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said.

Star Simpson, 19, had a computer circuit board and wiring in plain view over a black hooded sweat shirt she was wearing, said State Police Maj. Scott Pare, the commanding officer at the airport.

"She said that it was a piece of art and she wanted to stand out on career day," Pare said at a news conference. "She claims that it was just art, and that she was proud of the art and she wanted to display it." The battery-powered rectangular device had nine flashing lights, he said. Simpson also had Play-Doh in her hands, he said. The phrases "Socket to me" and "Course VI" were written on the back of sweat shirt, which authorities displayed to the media. Course VI appears to be a reference to MIT's major of electrical engineering and computer science.

Just what school of art would that be? Loose wire?
This is what you get when you go to a school without a football team.

Breaking news
STUDY: Steroids Increase Home Runs By MAGGIE FOX from the New York Post
September 21, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - Steroids can help batters hit 50 percent more home runs by boosting their muscle mass by just 10 percent, a U.S. physicist said yesterday.

Calculations show that, by putting on 10 percent more muscle mass, a batter can swing about 5 percent faster, increasing the ball's speed by 4 percent as it leaves the bat.

Depending on the ball's trajectory, this added speed could take it into home run territory 50 percent more often, said Roger Tobin of Tufts University in Boston.

"A 4 percent increase in ball speed, which can reasonably be expected from steroid use, can increase home run production by anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent," said Tobin, whose study will be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Physics.

Tobin read reports about steroids that said they could add about 10 percent to an athlete's total muscle mass. An extra 10 pounds of muscle, he said, could add just enough extra to a batter's swing to send the ball out of the park.

Could this be enough to help the Giants' Barry Bonds, dogged by allegations of past steroid use, hit his record-breaking 756th career home run last month?

"I haven't tried to look at Barry Bonds specifically so I haven't looked at his weight numbers," Tobin said. – Reuters

Really? And all this time I thought these guys just liked the taste of the nougat center.


This is what happens when all of your missiles are toy missiles

Mattel apologizes to China over recalls

BEIJING - U.S.-based toy giant Mattel Inc. issued an extraordinary apology to China on Friday over the recall of Chinese-made toys, taking the blame for design flaws and saying it had recalled more lead-tainted toys than justified.

The gesture by Thomas A. Debrowski, Mattel's executive vice president for worldwide operations, came in a meeting with Chinese product safety chief Li Changjiang, at which Li upbraided the company for maintaining weak safety controls.

"Our reputation has been damaged lately by these recalls," Debrowski told Li in a meeting at Li's office at which reporters were allowed to be present.

The carefully worded apology, delivered with company lawyers present, underscores China's central role in Mattel's business. The world's largest toy maker has been in China for 25 years and about 65 percent of its products are made in China.

China has become a center for the world's toy-making industry, exporting $7.5 billion worth of toys last year.

kow·tow (kou-tou, koutou)
intr.v. kow·towed, kow·tow·ing, kow·tows
1. To kneel and touch the forehead to the ground in expression of deep respect, worship, or submission, as formerly done in China.
2. To show servile deference. See Synonyms at fawn1.(The online dictionary)

From Wikipedia: “Despite common conceptions, an Imperial Courtier only has to kowtow to the Emperor once, not nine times as often described. Current Chinese etiquette does not contain any situations in which the kowtow is regularly performed in front of a living human being, although it may occur in rare and extreme cases where one is begging for forgiveness or offering an extreme apology, or showing respect in traditional funerals.”

Or when someone threatens to pull the plug on 65 percent of your manufacturing.

Frodo lives

According to the BBC, careful study of the "Hobbit" fossil's wrist bones supports the idea that the creature was a distinct species and not a diseased modern human, it is claimed. The 18,000-year-old bones of the Hobbit were unearthed on the Indonesian island of Flores, in a limestone cave at a site called Liang Bua.

Matthew Tocheri and colleagues tell Science magazine that the bones look nothing like those of Homo sapiens; they look ape-like.

The announcement in 2004 detailing the discovery of Homo floresiensis caused a sensation.

Some researchers, though, have doubted the interpretation of the find.

These individuals - including the Indonesian palaeoanthropologist Teuku Jacob - have argued that the remains are probably those of a pygmy with the brain defect known as microcephaly.

But the new analysis by Tocheri, from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, US, and co-authors will add further weight to the original assessment.

Their study shows that the wrist bones of the Hobbit are primitive and shaped differently from the bones of both modern humans and even their near-evolutionary cousins, the now extinct Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis).

The creature's wrist lacks a modern innovation seen in both these other human species - a wrist that distributes forces away from the base of the thumb and across the wrist for better shock-absorbing abilities.

"What was very clear from my perspective looking at the Hobbit's wrist bones is that it does not belong in the group that includes modern humans and Neanderthals. It basically has the same type of wrist that we see in [the ancient hominid] Homo habilis, that we see in Australopithecus (the famous 'Lucy' fossil) and that we see in living chimps and gorillas today," Matthew Tocheri told BBC News.

So being human really is “all in the wrist.”