New species found under the Antarctic

That evolution shapes the nature of organisms depending on their environment is well known. But we may think that we have explored pretty much all the Earth and thus encountered all the variety that exists. So it is interesting when previously unknown regions of the Earth that have vastly different environments from those we are familiar with reveal new kinds of organisms.
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“Where is my flying car?” may soon no longer be a joke

Some of you may remember the animated TV show The Jetsons about a family that lived in the future that had all manner of anticipated technological advances. One of them was the flying personal car and that particular item has become a punch line whenever people want to express disappointment that we do not have many of the amazing things that we thought had been promised to us in the dreams of science fiction writers.
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The problems with self-driving vehicles

Now that self-driving vehicles (SDVs) are becoming a reality, people are paying close attention to accident reports involving them. In almost all the cases, it appears that it was an error by the human in the other car that caused the accident. Here is a compilation of dash-cam videos taken from SDVs as they avoid accidents, some of which required quick reactions.


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Puzzling things about the Invisible Man

Some of you may have read H. G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man. There have been several films based on it that I have not seen but as a young boy, I was fascinated by a TV show that was based on the same idea but is set in modern times and is otherwise nothing like the book. In this show, as in the book, a scientific experiment gone wrong makes a man completely invisible, so he goes around wearing clothes, gloves, sunglasses, hat and with his face fully bandaged in order to keep his invisibility secret and make his presence visible and not freak people out.
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How to make people believe you have psychic powers

Following yesterday’s post about whether all mentalists are frauds, two commenters Acolyte of Sagan and RationalismRules recommended that I watch Derren Brown’s 2004 45-minute TV special Messiah and I did so last night. It was quite fascinating. I had not heard of Brown before but his Wikipedia page says that he is a British performer who uses “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship” to achieve his effects that convince his audiences that he has psychic and other supernatural powers though he himself explicitly denies that he has. The page also says that he uses “traditional magic/conjuring techniques, memory techniques, hypnosis, body language reading, cognitive psychology, cold reading and psychological, subliminal (specifically the use of PWA – “perception without awareness”) and ideomotor suggestion.”
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Are all mentalists frauds?

As readers know, I do not believe that supernatural forces exist because there has been no convincing evidence for them. Hence things like psychic phenomena must have some natural explanation, even if we cannot provide one for every case that people present to us. As I discussed in an earlier post, Ian Rowland, who does ‘psychic’ readings for people by using cold reading techniques, says that trying to provide explanations for the various phenomena that believers challenge you with is a mug’s game because when someone supposedly tells you of some astounding thing that happened to them or that they heard of from someone else, such accounts are utterly unreliable because people in general are hopeless at observing events and later remembering and describing them, coupled with the fact that they tend to subtly simplify the story to conform to their beliefs. Magicians know that their biggest allies in deception are the audience members who will deceive themselves about what they saw and later claim features of the trick that did not happen.
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What makes something black?

If we are in a room that contains no sources of light at all and the room is also sealed off so no light can enter from outside, then we will experience total blackness, irrespective of the color of the walls or the objects in the room. But we can, in theory, also experience total blackness even if the room has a bright source of light, provided that the source of light is behind us and everything in the room is black such that it absorbs 100% of the light that falls on it, and no light gets reflected back into our eyes. This is because the color of objects that do not themselves generate light is determined by what light they reflect. Objects that appear to be red reflect light that is largely in the red range of the visible spectrum of electromagnetic waves, and similarly for other colors. Black objects are those that do not reflect any light at all in the visible spectrum.
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Surprising result

Suppose that you, law-abiding driver that you are, are going along the highway at the posted speed limit of 70 mph. You see in your rear-view mirror a car traveling at high speed in the lane next to yours. Suppose that car is traveling at 100 mph. At the instant that the other car is right next to you, you both see an obstruction ahead, say a tree lying across the road. You both slam on your brakes to the maximum and you come to rest just before you hit the barrier. What would be the speed with which the other car hits the tree?
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