The Love Hurts

Why Do Men...?

Why Do Men...?Why do men do the things they do? Why are they obsessed with video games and fantasy sports? Why do they love terrible bands? Why do they read on the toilet? Ali gets to the bottom of some of the most mysterious male behavior with Roger Hailes of the Yahoo! Show, Mansome.

Roger was more than happy to be the unelected spokesman for men everywhere. A main motivator for men, he says, is to be able “to participate in something without actually doing it.” Roger estimates that, after a few months of playing something called ‘Assassin’s Creed,’ (which is something called a ‘video game’) he’d be a really excellent “high level assassin.”

As for why they read on the toilet, Roger says the more important question is, “Why DON’T women read on the toilet.”

Ali also wondered why men grunt at the gym. The answer to that one is apparently simple: because people grunt when we try. Roger tried to convince Ali that women do it too, but his only concrete example was Wimbledon.

After a few more enlightening explanations, Ali’s big epiphany about men is, “You’re just disgusting cavemen that have not evolved through evolution the way that women have.”

So is she just being a big sexist? Have a look at her chat with Roger and decide for yourself!

Watch the aurora borealis from above the sky

Watch the aurora borealis from above the sky - The International Space Station captures the otherworldly famous lights

The best time to see the aurora borealis here on Earth is during the coldest and darkest nights of the year, so people in the Northern Hemisphere still have a few more nights of ideal viewing. However, here on Earth we only get to see half the show. But luckily for us, the folks orbiting 240 miles above us on the International Space Station have been documenting what we’ve been missing. The aurora borealis and its southern sister, the aurora australis, are just as breathtaking from above, and the astronauts get a clear view any time of year. These atmospheric light shows are a product of charged particles interacting with the Earth’s magnetic sphere and are often tied to solar wind or other sun surface activity. Whichever way you look at it, the phenomenon is surreal. Check out this preternatural light show below.

A southern aurora captured from the International Space Station as it zipped by at 17,239.2 mph. Image by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

This striking aurora ribbon, snapped over the Indian Ocean, was likely caused by a major sun spot event. Image by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

Nighttime Chicago glows in the foreground while the northern lights shine just over the horizon. Image by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

The Aurora Borealis headed a little more south than usual when captured here hovering eerily over the Midwestern U.S. Image by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Aurora australis captured by the International Space Station crew over New Zealand and the Tasman Sea. Image by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

An aurora dances on the horizon as seen from 240 miles above the Indian Ocean. Image by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

A southern aurora captured from the International Space Station during one of its 15.7 daily spins around the world. Image by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

If the crew missed the aurora australis on this pass they’d have to wait a little more than 92 minutes to complete their orbit and try again. Image by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. ( grindtv.com )

Scientists have no idea when the next city-killing asteroid is coming

Scientists have no idea when the next city-killing asteroid is coming -The coincidence of today’s dramatic meteor hit in Russia and tonight’s near-miss by an asteroid, dubbed 2012 DA14, raises an important issue: Humans have no systematic way to scan the skies for threats from outer space.

2012 DA14 is a classic example: It was discovered only 12 months ago, not by a space agency but by a Spanish dentist. It will come so close to earth that it will actually come between us and some of our satellites. It weighs either 130,000 or 180,000 tonnes (143,000 or 198,000 US tons), depending on which NASA website you trust, and is half as big as a sports stadium. For comparison, today’s meteor over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk was only between 10 and 50 tonnes.

As asteroids go 2012 DA14 is pretty tiny. But had its orbit been only slightly different, it would have impacted our planet with a 3.5-megaton blast, equivalent to the force of 200 Hiroshima bombs (though it’s sobering to note that that’s only three times the power of the biggest warhead in America’s arsenal today, and a mere one-seventh as powerful as the biggest bomb ever built).

Oh, and even if we’d known it was coming? We would have been powerless to do anything, as no space agency is equipped to redirect the course of an asteroid.

These are the sorts of things that members of the B612 foundation, including former NASA scientists, worry about. Today, if ever, is their day. From an eye-opening post on their site:

…the fact that we knew ahead of time that 2012 DA14 is about to buzz by Earth is really only a matter of luck. Ninety nine percent of the time we are oblivious, simply because we have not mapped and tracked 99 percent of Near Earth Asteroids.

There are about a million asteroids in our solar system as large or larger than DA14. Of those, fewer than 10,000 have been identified and tracked.

Censuses of asteroids in our immediate neighborhood capture only a fraction of the objects that could pose a threat. 2012 DA14 is in the <100 data-blogger-escaped-category.="" data-blogger-escaped-m="" data-blogger-escaped-nasa="" data-blogger-escaped-p="">Meteors strike earth five to ten times per year. Obviously, few are as dramatic as what exploded over Chelyabinsk. But sometimes we get unlucky. On June 30, 1908, something gigantic smacked into Siberia in what’s known as the Tunguska Event. 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of forest were flattened. If the object—either a meteoroid or comet—had struck a city instead, it would have wiped it out completely. The devastated region, note Ed Lu of B612 and Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, was about the size of the San Francisco Bay Area.

And, they say, there is an estimated 30% chance of another such rock hitting the planet this century. The problem: unless we spot such rocks years in advance, we can’t deflect them in time. Which is why B612 is trying to build a space telescope to spot and map all the asteroids big enough to pose a serious threat. ( qz.com )

Our Moon Is Not Alone

Thousands of Minimoons: Our Moon Is Not Alone - There's the one big one we all know and love, but there are also minimoons that temporarily orbit our planet. Maybe, just maybe, we can snag one and bring it back to Earth.

The simulated path of a minimoon (NASA)

The moon, everybody knows, orbits around the Earth. But though the moon's the biggest and the most constant, it's not our lone natural satellite: Scientists believe that at any given time there are about a thousand larger-than-a-softball minimoons in our planet's gravitational pull, and about one or two of those are the size of dishwashers. They stay around Earth for between six and 18 months before heading off, back in thrall to the sun's gravitational pull.

Larger minimoons arrive too, but less frequently. A minimoon about the size of a school bus probably comes and hangs out every half century or so; one the size of a football field may come about once every 100,000 years. "A hundred thousand years is about the time frame that human beings have been doing things like leaving their handprints on cave walls, so maybe in that time frame somebody once actually looked into the sky and saw a mini-moon moving across the sky," Robert Jedicke, who studies these minimoons, told National Geographic last year.

Their small size means that these minimoons -- despite their proximity, at least by space standards -- are difficult to spot. "So far, there's been just one confirmed sighting," writes Irene Klotz of Discovery News.

That may change soon. NASA was recently gifted two Hubble-quality space telescopes, and Jedicke and his colleagues are proposing we aim one of those badboys to search for these minimoons. His dream isn't just to watch these moons as they flit about the Earth, but to capture them.

"It's the Rosetta stone of the solar system. You bring back a chunk of material that's never been processed through the atmosphere, that's not been sitting on the ground. It's going to be a tremendous wealth of information about how the solar system formed -- even more so if you can bring back more than one and get different types of material," he told Klotz. ( The Atlantic )

Teen fatally shot when he mistakenly went into wrong house

Teen fatally shot when he mistakenly went into wrong house - Caleb Gordley, a popular athlete who had been living in a brick house with his parents and sister for about a year, sneaked out of his house to go to a party with friends after he'd been grounded for not cleaning his room.

A 16-year-old who lived in Loudoun County, Va., was shot and killed when he accidentally entered the wrong house.

When he returned around 2 a.m. he slipped into the house he thought was his. Friends said he had been drinking and mistook his neighbor’s similar house two doors down for his own and climbed in through the back window.

When the burglar alarm sounded, the homeowner treated Caleb as an intruder, and shot and killed him.

Caleb’s father, Shawn Gordley, told The Washington Post, “They have the exact same staircase as us, the exact same carpet. Caleb clearly thought he was in his own house.” He added, “He probably stumbled around and was just trying to go to his room.”

At Sterling Park High school in Sterling, Va., students mourned the loss of a talented athlete. The coach of the basketball team, Mike Koscinski, who had advanced Caleb to varsity this year, said of the junior, “He was the hype man. He got everyone hyped up before games.”

A statement from the family reads, “Between the darkness and him being under the influence of alcohol, his mistake turned into the ultimate tragedy.”

Police are continuing to investigate the shooting, but Virginia law gives “wide latitude to people who fear for their safety when someone breaks into their homes,” according to The Washington Post.

Family members hold photos of Caleb Gordley in Sterling, Va. (Associated Press/Ann Heisenfelt)

Scientists Want to Bring Some Animals Back from Extinction

Scientists Want to Bring Some Animals Back from Extinction - On Friday at a National Geographic-sponsored TEDx conference, scientists met in Washington, D.C. to discuss which animals we should bring back from extinction. They also discussed the how, why, and ethics of doing so. They called it "de-extinction."

There are a few guidelines for which ancient species are considered, and sadly, dinosaurs are so long dead they aren't in the picture. Their DNA has long ago degraded, so researchers are fairly sure that Jurassic Park will never happen.

They chose the animals using the following criteria: Are the species desirable — do they hold an important ecological function or are they beloved by humans? Are the species practical choices — do we have access to tissue that could give us good quality DNA samples or germ cells to reproduce the species? And are they able to be reintroduced to the wild — are the habitats in which they live available and do we know why they went extinct in the first place?

This still leaves plenty of other animals on the table. The list of candidates is actually pretty long, considering. The cost of de-extinction varies by species but projects could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. Then there's also the cost of housing the animals once they are created, and re-introducing them into the wild and protecting them from poachers once they are there.

But, if you were the zoo that had that one Woolly mammoth or saber-toothed cat, these costs just might be worth it.

Here are 10 animals they are hoping to one day resurrect.

1. The mythical Aurochs is not a myth at all, actually. It is the ancestor of domestic cattle and lived throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa. They died off in 1627.

Wikimedia/DFoidl

2. The Dodo is known for being really dumb — but really it was just fearless because it evolved without any natural predators. Humans who arrived on its home island, Mauritius, took advantage of this and killed them all for food.

Public domain

3. The Labrador Duck was always rare but disappeared between 1850 and 1870. Supposedly it didn't taste good, so it wasn't hunted extensively for food, so its extinction isn't fully explained.

Public domain

4.The Ivory-billed Woodpecker lived in "virgin forests" of the southeastern United states, but there hasn't been a confirmed sighting of the bird since the 1940s. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology even offered a $50,000 reward for someone who could lead researchers to a living specimen.

Original photo by Arthur A. Allen, coloured version by Jerry A. Payne

5. Frozen carcasses of the Woolly Mammoth allow scientists access to well-preserved DNA from these prehistoric giant animals, related to elephants. The last isolated population of woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until 4,000 years ago.

Wikipedia user Dantheman9758

6. The Mastodon is an extinct species related to elephants that lived in North and Central America. They went extinct 12,000 years ago.

Wikipedia user Dantheman9758

7. This extinct species of plains Zebra, the Quagga, once lived in South Africa. The last wild one was shot in 1870 and the last in captivity died in 1883.

Public domain

8. The iconic Saber-toothed cat, Smilodon, is also on the list. It died out about 10,000 years ago due to climate changes at the end of the last Ice Age.

Charles R. Knight

9. The Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, is the only marsupial to make the list. It lived in Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea until the 1960s.

Public domain

10. The Caribbean monk seal was hunted to extinction for use as oil, and they were out-competed for fish (their main food source) by humans. The last individual was seen in 1952.

Public domain ( Business Insider )

Cold threat to hibernating species

Cold threat to hibernating species - The late arrival of spring could hit wild creatures which hibernate such as bats and hedgehogs, conservationists have warned.

The cold weather has led to a significant drop in sightings of early spring wildlife compared with last year, according to reports received from the public by the Woodland Trust's Nature's Calendar recording scheme.

Spring's late arrival could affect wild creatures such as hedgehogs which hibernate, say conservationists

Sightings of the common seven-spot ladybird and the peacock butterfly have been notably sparse in the North of England and in Scotland compared with 2012, and records of tree budburst are lagging behind other years, the Woodland Trust said.

There are also few records of blackbirds building nests in the Midlands and the North, and frog tadpoles have mostly only been spotted in the South West, according to the scheme which allows the public to submit sightings of nature to help monitor the changing seasons.

Last year the mild weather between January and March led to some exceptionally early sightings of wildlife, but this year's continuing cold conditions have delayed the emergence of many creatures and plants.

The Woodland Trust raised concerns that the late arrival of spring would hit species which hibernate because they would not emerge in the cold conditions, and may not have sufficient fat reserves to survive until warmer weather.

And those that do emerge will find little in the way of food, such as insects, the Trust's conservation adviser, Kay Haw, said, adding: "Species that may suffer are those that hibernate. Dormice and hedgehogs spend most of their time before hibernation fattening themselves up so they can survive this dormant period.

"However, if they do not have enough fat reserves, perhaps because of a lack of food or an extended period of hibernation due to a long cold winter, they can die.

"Bats are a similar story, and, even if they did come out, there would be virtually no insect food around because it is just too cold for most invertebrates at the moment." ( Press Association )