Now what?

kepler452b

NASA has announced the discovery of a distant earth-like planet, Kepler-452b.

Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a good chance of being rocky.

While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.

“We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth’s evolving environment,” said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who led the team that discovered Kepler-452b. “It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth. That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet.”

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It’s good to have your identity shaken up now and then

Remember Rust, the video game that randomly assigned a skin color to players? Some people found that horribly objectionable.

Now the game is provoking people more: it also randomly assigns a sex. As you might guess, once again, some refuse to play.

As a further twist, the player avatars are anatomically correct, and they randomize penis size. This is going to be an interesting experiment in human psychology!

It’s science! #Gamergaters are bad gamers

This is amusing. A simple study watched people playing the game Halo, and correlated skill at the game with how they treated other men and women players. It turns out that losers tend to be more disparaging of women.

As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.

Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers.

A chart from the Halo study that shows how nice male gamers were to other males (dotted line) and females (solid line) during gameplay. Men always treat each other about the same. But the better a player gets, the more likely he is to be nice to ladies. (Kasumovic et al)

A chart from the Halo study that shows how nice male gamers were to other males (dotted line) and females (solid line) during gameplay. Men always treat each other about the same. But the better a player gets, the more likely he is to be nice to ladies. (Kasumovic et al)

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I’m feeling so 17th century now

Below is a greatly simplified chart of the history of mathematics. The interesting bit is the black bar on the time line, which indicates where (optimistically) high school math stops. With calculus? I got pre-calc/trigonometry in high school, most of our incoming students haven’t had calculus yet, so it’s a little bit off.

Wait. I’ve had a fair bit of statistics…that’s early 20th century! What a relief, I won’t have to worry the ridiculous over-the-knee boots and pelisse when my classes drift into a little mathematics.

What all the really cool kids are doing right now

crisprcas

It’s CRISPR/Cas. I’m feeling a bit square because I’m not doing it yet. But maybe you’re so squaresville that you don’t even know what the heck it is. You’re saved like a hipster at a flea market: here’s a primer on CRISPR/Cas so you can pretend to be one of the with-it kids.

Simply put, this is a tool that combines targeting information that homes in on a precise location within the genome (that’s the CRISPR part), with the ability to generate DNA breaks at that site once it arrives there (that’s Cas’s job). Such tools are integral to the process of gene editing, because the ability to interrupt a continuous strand of DNA at a specific location is the first step to altering the information encoded there. There are other gene editing tools currently in use in research labs, but CRISPR/Cas has quickly gained popularity for the very practical reason that it’s a bit easier and less expensive to use than the other options.

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