On:

How Do You Pee in Space?

It’s the question astronauts get asked the most: how do you pee in space?

Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space on May 5, 1961. Although NASA engineers had put considerable planning into his mission, noticeably missing from this extensive preparation was a way for him to urinate in his spacesuit. During a lengthy launch delay, the inevitable happened: Shepard had to relieve himself. The result? His urine short-circuited his electronic biosensors.

In less than a year, engineers had remedied this seeming oversight for John Glenn’s Mercury orbital flight. The system developed for Glenn stood the test of time, remaining in use until the early days of the Space Shuttle program.
read more

On:

This witness has a good camera setup and gets a lot of footage of unknowns as a result. While there is more activity is some places than in others, setting up an automatic sky recording system will result in at least an occasional unknown being captured on video. In places where there is lots of visible sky and not a lot of ambient light, more will be observed. Using infra-red cameras will bring even more. Fifty years ago, a UFO was a startling and rare sight. This is no longer true. They are relatively common all over the world. This is a particularly good ‘catch,’ though.
read more

On:

Over 200 dead dolphins have washed up on the East Coast of the US. A similar spike of dolphin deaths occurred in 1987 when more than 700 dolphins died and a bacterial infection was identified as the main culprit. This time, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOA) 91 dead dolphins have washed up in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia in July alone. Last year, those same states had a combined death toll of nine. In 2011, the total was 16. The number of animals that die at sea is believed to be far larger than the number that wash up on beaches.
read more

On:

University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard.

While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.
read more