Curio Cabinet / Nerdy Curio

You might have noticed that Google’s first “doodle” of December was livelier than a plain old static image! In fact, it was a playable, platformer-style video game made to honor a Silicon Valley pioneer: video game developer Jerry Lawson. His career began in the 1970s, when he began working as one of the few Black engineers in Silicon Valley at a company called Fairchild Semiconductor. He was also a member of the Homebrew Computing Club, a hobbyist group that included several now-famous tech figures, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The things Lawson learned there came in handy when his company sent him to meet with Allan Alcorn, creator of the wildly popular video game Pong. Lawson was there to discuss his company’s role in supplying Alcorn with electronic components for his game, but the meeting ended up being inspirational for Lawson. Soon after, he began building a video game of his own, Demolition Derby, in his garage. Impressed by what he had made, Lawson’s company put him in charge of developing an in-home video game console for them. Gaming consoles were still quite new at the time, but under Lawson’s leadership, his team created a system called the Fairchild Channel F, which was released in 1976. The console was the first to feature an eight-way joystick, a pause menu, and, most importantly, removable game cartridges. Lawson’s invention of these cartridges not only earned him the nickname “father of the video game cartridge”, it changed the gaming industry forever, since it allowed consumers to play multiple games on one device. Unfortunately, the Fairchild Channel F never became the commercial hit that later consoles, like the following year’s Atari 2600, would be. Still, it paved the way for a much brighter gaming future. Without Lawson, we might be stuck playing one game per console, and that would get expensive quick!

 
[Image description: A photo of the black, plastic Fairchild Channel F System II video game console which was released in 1979.] Credit & copyright: Evan-Amos, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

They say that the hand is quicker than the eye, but what’s quicker than the hand? Researchers at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Intel have just introduced FakeCatcher, which can detect deepfakes in real-time with 96 percent accuracy. Deepfake technology uses AI to manipulate the facial expressions and speech of a person in a video to create realistic but completely false footage. On the harmless end of the spectrum, content creators can use it to make videos of themselves looking like a celebrity. On the more sinister end, it can be used to create footage of politicians and public officials saying or doing things they never did. What was once science fiction is now a growing concern, and as the technology gets better, it’s becoming a ticking time bomb of misinformation. On the bright side, a number of companies have been engaged in an arms race against the technology to create something that can detect when a video has been faked. In the case of FakeCatcher, it detects by analyzing the blood flows in the subject’s face, which currently can’t be faked. It uses photoplethysmography (PPG), which measures the amount of light that is absorbed by blood vessels. The colors of the vessels change with every heartbeat, and while it’s not noticeable with the naked eye, the changes can be detected by a computer. FakeCatcher is designed to detect these changes on 32 points on the face. Best of all, it can do this with a delay of mere milliseconds, making it possible to catch deepfakes as soon as they show up. The internet might be flooded with misinformation, but at least now there’s a way to tread water.
 

[Image description: A digital illustration of a hand in front of technological symbols atop a world map.] Credit & copyright: TheDigitalArtist, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday and Black Friday! In honor of the holiday buying season, enjoy these curios all about shopping and consumer crazes. 
Ever felt that navigating a retail store or a shopping mall is like a maze? Then you've experienced the Gruen Effect. Those confusing layouts slow shoppers down and increase purchases. It’s named, unfairly, after Victor Gruen, who created the first shopping mall. Gruen was born in Vienna and trained with the famed modernist German architect Peter Behrens. But when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Jewish Gruen left for New York with $8 in his pocket. Gruen found a niche designing retail shops, a particularly challenging task at the tail end of the Great Depression. But Gruen figured out how to get customers into stores with incredible window displays. Soon his storefronts were in demand all over the US. During his travels he noticed Americans spent huge amounts of time driving from store to store. So he conceived of a “third place” (after work and home) where people could "connect with others" while doing their shopping. The idea of the shopping mall was born. Gruen opened the 800,000 square-foot Southdale Center in Minnesota, in 1956. It had fountains, an aviary, a large art installation, and distant parking lots to encourage walking. Gruen's original drawings included a medical center, apartments, offices, child-care, libraries, and schools--but these plans were never realized. In the next few decades over 1,200 shopping centers were built across the US. Gruen was right: people did flock to these centers. But instead of creating a communal effect, they contributed to the suburban sprawl he was trying to fix. And he certainly was not in support of creating confusion to get customers to buy more, as his namesake effect implies. A few years before his death in 1980, Gruen said, “I disclaim paternity [of the shopping mall] once and for all. They destroyed our cities.” Gruen would be happy to know that the American shopping mall is dying, and being replaced by urban mixed-use centers very close to his original vision. These new centers allow residents to eat, work and shop within a few blocks of where they live. No car necessary. No green house gases either. In other words, the true Gruen Effect is finally taking place.
 
Image credit & copyright: reverent, Pixabay
 

Water usually falls from the sky as rain or snow, but don’t forget about watery meteorites. After analyzing a meteorite that fell in rural England last year, scientists from the Natural History Museum in London have just published their findings in the journal Science Advances. They say that their examination supports the idea that Earth’s water originally came from outer space. Their research took a step forward after a small meteorite crashed into a driveway in Winchcombe, a small town in Gloucestershire, England. This meteorite was recovered from its impact site quicker than usual, with scientists from the Natural History Museum collecting it just 12 hours after it made impact. The scientific paper’s lead author, Ashley King, told Science News, “It’s as pristine as we’re going to get from a meteorite. Other than it landing in the museum on my desk, or other than sending a spacecraft up there, we can’t really get them any quicker or more pristine.” Upon analyzing the remains, King and her colleagues found that 11 percent of the meteorite’s weight was taken up by water in the form of hydrated minerals. Moreover, the composition of hydrogen isotopes in the water were similar to that of water found on Earth, suggesting that much of, if not all of, the water on this planet came from water-rich asteroids in the planet’s early days. It gives a whole new meaning to the term “meteor shower.”

[Image description: A photo of Meteor Crater, or Barringer Crater, in the desert of northern Arizona.] Credit & copyright: National Map Seamless Server, NASA Earth Observatory, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
 

This invention might just light up your day, along with your ears. A 14-year-old has been announced as the winner of the 2022 3M Young Scientist Challenge after inventing headphones that can treat ear infections. Leanne Fan from Mesa Verde Middle School in Poway, California, developed the headphones over three years with the help of a mentor assigned by 3M. Named the “Finsen Headphones” after Niels Finsen, who first discovered UV light’s antibacterial potential, the headphones are fairly straightforward in how they treat ear infections. Aside from delivering quality audio to the listener’s ears, they use blue light therapy to kill bacteria living in the ear canals. While blue light emitted from electronic devices like smartphones has been criticized for its disruptive effect on sleep patterns, that same light can be used to treat a variety of small ailments. In fact, Blue Light Therapy has already been shown to be effective in treating acne and some types of skin cancer. Mid-ear infections cause around 21,000 deaths around the world each year, so it seems only natural to incorporate bacteria-killing technology into such a ubiquitous device. For getting first place in the competition, Fan received $25,000 and the title of "America's Top Young Scientist.” She hopes to use some of her winnings to get a patent for her invention. Audiophiles now have one more feature to check off their lists while shopping for the perfect headphones.

 

[Image description: A woman in a gray shirt wears headphones while seated on a couch.] Credit & copyright: PourquoiPas, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday! In honor of Origami Day, enjoy these curios all about paper. How many words are published on the World Wide Web? A lot. One research team estimated it would take 136 billion sheets of 8-by-11 paper to print out the entire Web. If you used standard typing paper--.0039 inches thick--it would stack up 8,300 miles high! Estimating this wasn't easy. First the team determined the equivalent number of printed pages for an average website: 15 sheets. They then multiplied the average by the number of indexable sites on the web, which is roughly 4.45 billion. Which means you need at least 68,100,002,500 pages of paper to print the Web. That translates into 8,011,765 trees, or about 44 square miles of Amazonian rain forest. Since their calculation doesn’t include what’s known as the “Deep Web”--pages not indexed by search engines, assumed to be much larger than the searchable internet. So the team doubled the number, arriving at 136 billion pieces of paper, or 16 million trees. That's three times the number of trees growing in New York City! Please don't try this at home. In fact, please don't print Web pages period.

Image credit & copyright: stevepb, Pixabay
 

Does crowdsourcing infrastructure maintenance sound like a shaky idea? Apparently, it’s got some solid potential. Scientists have found a way to monitor the structural health of bridges using smartphones, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Engineering. Bridges sometimes have stationery monitors that keep tabs on how much they vibrate. This valuable information helps assess their structural integrity, since too much vibrating can indicate imminent collapse. Such monitors are expensive, but their absence can result in catastrophic failures. Luckily, this problem can be mitigated by simply crowdsourcing vibratory-monitoring data from the smartphones people driving over bridges. For their study, researchers from MIT created an app that collects pertinent data. Then, they had a driver with the app installed on their phone drive over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco 102 times. They also collected the same data from 72 trips by Uber drivers. What they found was that sensors on the smartphones were able to record vibration data nearly as accurately as the bridge’s stationery monitors. While the accuracy of the readings are off by a few percentage points, the researchers noted that a single smartphone passing over the bridge once provided as much data as over a hundred dedicated sensors. If widely implemented, this new system could significantly cut down on costs related to inspections and allow local governments to deploy maintenance crews in a timelier manner. Imagine a future where keeping your phone charged is a matter of civic duty.

[Image description: The Golden Gate Bridge] Credit & copyright: chenhengyu, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday! In honor of King Tut Day, the anniversary of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, enjoy these curios all about unearthed treasures. 
The British monarchy aren’t the only royals with juicy secrets. Over the centuries, examining the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs has taught us a lot about how these ancient rulers lived. Yet one important mummy remained unwrapped: that of Pharaoh Amenhotep I, who ruled between around 1526 to 1506 BC. Amenhotep’s sarcophagus is elaborately decorated, featuring a painted face mask with obsidian eyes and a cobra headdress with inlaid stones, all wrapped in floral garlands. Opening the sarcophagus would undoubtedly do damage to these intricate decorations. So, modern Egyptian researchers found a workaround. Using CT (computed tomography) technology, they scanned the sarcophagus, digitally “unwrapping” the mummy inside.
 
According to a statement made in late December by Dr Sahar Saleem, professor of radiology at the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University and the radiologist of the Egyptian Mummy Project, the scans have allowed researchers to see more of Amenhotep than the naked eye ever could. “By digitally unwrapping of the mummy and ‘peeling off’ its virtual layers—the facemask, the bandages, and the mummy itself—we could study this well-preserved pharaoh in unprecedented detail,” Saleem explained. So far, they’ve discovered that Amenhotep was around 35 years old when he died, around five feet, five inches tall, and circumcised. With his narrow chin, protruding upper teeth and curly hair, Amenhotep I probably looked like his father, Ahmose I, whose mummy was found to have similar features. Underneath Amenhotep’s wrappings, scans found that he wore 30 different amulets in various places, and a girdle made of gold. Lucky for this well-dressed mummy that he can rest easy with all his bling intact!

[Image description: A painted Egyptian sarcophagus.] Credit & copyright: albertr, Pixabay
 

Being a trailblazer isn’t always a great thing. According to a paper published in the journal Current Biology, wildlife researchers have found that mountain lions (Puma concolor) that are forced out of their habitats by wildfires engage in riskier behavior than other mountain lions. The cats in question initially fled the Woolsey Fire that started near Los Angeles, California, near the end of 2018. The fire burned 89,000 acres across the Santa Monica mountains. As people fled the area, so did the local wildlife, including 11 mountain lions that happened to be wearing tracking collars. Of the 11, nine survived the fires, with one of the deceased lions choosing to flee back into the burned areas rather than go near humans. Another was found dead on a freeway a few months after the fire, apparently fleeing a fight with another, uncollared cat. The nine surviving lions are taking care to avoid the presence of humans, but to their detriment. Researchers found that one of the collared cats had crossed a section of Interstate 405 after the fire, the first recorded instance in 16 years of a mountain lion crossing a large road. They also seem to be crossing U.S. Highway 101 every 4 months, while the frequency before the fire was around once every 2 years. In the paper, researchers state that the reason for the increase in dangerous road crossings is partly a result of a “risk-response mismatch.” Essentially, the cats see road crossings as a safer alternative to passing near urban areas, even though the opposite is true. While the research shows that mountain lions are capable of an amazing degree of adaptation, it also highlights the difficulty faced by wildlife that are trying to navigate around human infrastructure, especially when under pressure from natural disasters. If only cats really had nine lives.
 

[Image description: A mountain lion crouches on a rock against a blue sky.] Credit & copyright: CorinnaSt, Pixabay
 

If you’re looking for a fright, forget the ghosts and ghouls—get a poorly designed fan system. Halloween is nearly here, but all the spooky decorations and haunted houses have nothing on the terror of infrasound. Beyond the human hearing range, frequencies that are too high to hear are called ultrasound, and on the opposite end is infrasound. While infrasound can’t be heard, it can have surprising effects on the human body, as discovered by a scientist named Vic Tandy. One night in the early 1980s, Tandy was alone in a lab that was purported to be haunted, and he indeed felt a gloomy presence. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a gray apparition that disappeared as soon as he turned to look toward it. The next day, Tandy brought in a fencing sword to repair at the lab, where it began vibrating after being placed in a vise. As it turned out, the culprit behind both the vibrating sword and the hallucinations was a faulty fan system that produced an inaudible drone at 19 Hertz. When an object is exposed to sound that matches its natural or resonant frequency, it sometimes vibrates. What Tandy surmised was that his fencing sword and much of the human body have the same resonant frequency, and that being exposed to 19 Hertz of infrasound has strange effects on people. It can produce a sense of dread and even mild hallucinations by vibrating the eyeballs. That’s what caused Tandy to see an “apparition.” Tandy and other researchers later visited supposedly haunted locations, only to find that the strange occurrences reported there could be attributed to previously undetected infrasound. Be sure to check your ventilation system before investing in expensive ghost-hunting equipment!

[Image description: A ceiling fan with wooden blades hangs from an ornate, white ceiling.] Credit & copyright: JamesDeMers, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday! In honor of Celebration of the Mind Day, enjoy these curios all about innovation and discovery. 
Lights out? Not anymore. Researchers at the University of South Australia (UniSA) and a company called Impact Absorbing Systems (IAS) are currently working together to develop a traffic light that can withstand car crashes. Lead researcher Dr. Mohammad Uddin explained, in a statement, “Existing traffic lights are rigid steel, hollow structures which cause severe and fatal injuries to pedestrians and motorists when a vehicle smashes into them...The cost to human life is bad enough, but they also leave councils with a significant bill to repair and replace them.”
 
In Australia, at least, that bill can be as high as $16 million every year. The researchers’ new traffic light design should save money and lives by building upon IAS’s existing bollard design, which features a polyurethane cartridge that sits inside a cone-shaped cavity in the foundation of a bollard, a short, vertical post. When struck, the polyurethane deforms to absorb the impact, allowing the bollard to tilt. This deflects the front of the vehicle slightly upward, lessening the severity of the impact on passengers. As an added bonus, the bollard is also 10 times stronger than conventional, rigid ones. Uddin and his team are in the process of testing out the best configurations for integrating the bollard into the pole of a traffic light, giving the structure energy-absorbing qualities and durability that could end up saving lives. Hopes are high that the project can be completed in 12 months. Until then, drive safe, Australia!
 

[Image description: A traffic light with a red heart design lit up.] Credit & copyright: tomgirlby, Pixabay
 

Laughter might be the best medicine, but you can’t self-medicate. Scientists in Germany are beginning to shed light on the age-old mystery of why people can’t tickle themselves. Until now, there's never been a solid answer. That’s because, according to Michael Brecht at Humboldt University, it’s never been seriously studied. He told Wired, “It’s been a bit of a stepchild of scientific investigation. But, I think there are also more deep prejudices against play—it's something for children.” Brecht and his team conducted experiments in which participants tickled each other on randomly assigned body parts. They reacted with laughter, as expected. However, when they were asked to tickle themselves, there wasn’t much of an effect. Strangely, however, when they were asked to tickle themselves while also being tickled by someone else, their laughter was noticeably subdued. Previously, it was believed that self-tickling wasn’t possible because the brain is able to predict where the touch is going to be, unlike when someone else is doing the tickling. But Brecht believes his findings suggest otherwise—he thinks that when people touch themselves anywhere, their bodies are inhibiting sensitivity so that they aren’t constantly tickling themselves. He stated, “We think what is happening is the brain has a trick to know: As soon as you touch yourself, don’t listen.” He must be tickled pink that science finally has an answer!
 

[Image description: A pink feather against a white background.] Credit & copyright: stevepb, Pixabay