Wine connoisseurs no doubt have an extensive repertoire of knowledge when it comes to wines and they have tasted everything from a chardonnay to a Sauvignon blanc to a Pinot noir.

For an amateur or a casual enthusiast in wines, one might be able to resonate with Sarah Miller's story of the monthly blind wine tasting session she attends.

Unlike experts or people who devote a significant amount of time searching and researching wines, an amateur wouldn't necessarily be able to distinguish perfectly between types of wine or brands, or when they were made. One would probably go with past experience as a point of comparison but unless one has an extensive experience of tasting wine, it won't give much headway.

You look at the wine, you smell the wine, you taste the wine. You go around the table in order and discuss various elements of the wine, related to various sensory observations, which, during those four minutes, you have responded to according to the categories provided for you on this sheet, courtesy of the Court of Master Sommeliers, which is called THE GRID, and which you can see at the top of this piece.

As they pick apart the different sensory perceptions, they would try to identify what type of wine it is, where it was made, and when. In this particular session, they were going through "classic whites". Here's how it went.

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We tend to imagine bees generally having a specific set of color patterns but looking closely, though they exhibit the same colors, the patterns come in varieties.

"There is exceptional diversity in coloration of bumble bees," said Heather Hines, assistant professor of biology and of entomology at Penn State and principal investigator of the study. "Of the roughly 250 species of bumble bees, there are over 400 different color patterns that basically mix and match the same few colors over the different segments of a bee's body."

Evolutionary factors play into the bees' coloration. For example, one may notice that in some species, at the sting end of its body, a red spot could be found which would warn or signal danger for those who see it. The researchers also noted that bees from the same region would usually mimic patterns.

In spite of the great diversity available, color patterns tend to converge toward similarity within a particular geographic region because they serve as an important and effective warning signal. This is an example of Müllerian mimicry, where similar, often vibrant, color patterns are used among multiple species to warn predators of a dangerous feature like toxicity or sharp spines.

In researching these color patterns, the researchers were able to identify a particular region in a gene, called the Abdominal-B which regulates how the colors are expressed.

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Winter is here, and it doesn't look good. The Wight army are making way for Westeros and nothing is going to stop them. But let's escape the realm of fiction and lore, and delve a bit into the science behind these reanimated corpses.

With some help from a neuroscientist, we will try illuminate what these wights or zombies are, how do they function, whether they eat brains, and all that jazz.

“There’s the socio-cultural definition of zombie from tales in Haitian voodoo, where someone was put into a state similar to death and then ‘brought back to life,’” says Bradley Voytek, avid Game of Thrones fan, neuroscientist at the University of California-San Diego, and co-author of Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep, which uses zombies as the basis for an introduction to serious neuroscience.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The Big Apple is still one of the most visited cities in the world. It bears a lot of history and culture, through its streets, the architectural design of its buildings, and the faces of the people walking by.

Spanish photographer Manel Armengol wanted to capture the essence of what New York was and is. It culminated in his album of black-and-white New York City photographs which shows the landscape, the scenes, the people, the parks, the cars, and the streets on which he traversed.

You may check out his album here.

(Image credit: Manel Armengol/Flickr)

NASA plans to send humans back to the moon and then move on to Mars. That was the objective of the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) and the directive given by the late President George H.W. Bush to NASA, 30 years ago. There had already been plans to have human exploration on Mars and beyond three decades before, and yet what happened to those initiatives?

The ambitious plan proposed NASA return to the Moon in a decade and send by human missions to Mars in the 2010s. But distrust between the White House and NASA and a politically disastrous $500 billion initial cost estimate sank the initiative.

Yet here we are, 30 years later, in a familiar set of circumstances: a sudden announcement with details yet to be worked out by NASA, a National Space Council, an involved White House, a promise of additional funds, and the hope that there are new ways of doing business that can somehow lower the cost. With so many similarities, surely the failure of SEI has something to tell us?

There are a few lessons we can learn from these failed initiatives and Casey Dreier lists them down. As there are further plans being made on space exploration in the future, changes in space policy may improve the progress toward reaching beyond our solar system.

(Image credit: Alan Chinchar/NASA)

Unless you have been stranded in the wilderness with no form of connection or communication with the rest of the world, some people would find it an offense for one not to know "common knowledge" about pop culture.

By this, of course, we refer to events, people, or trends that have risen to a certain level of widespread collective consciousness in the context of mainstream pop culture such that it would be improbable for one not to know or even to have heard of them.

But there comes a point when it becomes too much of a chore as people around you constantly tell you that you "must" or "should" watch this or that, otherwise you would be left out. This puts on too much pressure on you, something we now call FOMO, and defeats the purpose of watching, reading, or listening something: for one's enjoyment of it.

Essentializing any form of art limits it, setting parameters on not only what we are supposed to receive, but how. As Wesley Morris wrote of our increasingly moralistic approach to culture, this “robs us of what is messy and tense and chaotic and extrajudicial about art.” Now, instead of approaching everything with a sense of curiosity, we approach with a set of guidelines.

Our response to pop culture has turned from appreciation and personal enjoyment into avoiding being out of the loop and the silent judgment from our friends and colleagues out of our ignorance. And so this elicits a more negative response to pop culture as opposed to a general, neutral stance on any form of art.

Creating art to dominate this discursive landscape turns that art into a chore — in other words, cultural homework. This kind of coercion has been known to cause an extreme side effect — reactance, a psychological phenomenon in which a person who feels their freedom being constricted adopts a combative stance, turning a piece of art we might otherwise be neutral about into an object of derision.

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For a long time now, plans have been in the pipeline for a high-speed railway system in the United States which would speed up logistics and hopefully, integrate lines to connect different states to make transportation and travel easier and faster.

However, high speed rail has faced staunch opposition from the legal to the political, and now to issues on semantics.

Despite having everything laid out for the Texas High Speed Rail to come into fruition and begin its construction, Texas Central Railway is facing an existential question posed by the opposition: whether it's a railroad at all.

“Simply self-declaring that you are a railroad does not make it so,” Kyle Workman, the president of the opposition group Texans Against High-Speed Rail, told the Houston Chronicle in February.

The terminology is important for reasons beyond its own sake. Being a railroad or not determines whether Texas Central is entitled to use eminent domain as it surveys and acquires property. State law allows railroads and certain other private companies to use eminent domain to seize land for projects in the public interest.

Unfortunately, a judge ruled that Texas Central did not have the right of eminent domain because they do not operate a rail system yet. But that's not all. There are other legal hurdles dealing with property rights and right-of-way that Texas Central has to overcome.

Hopefully, if these would be cleared, the plans would be underway by late 2019.

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In honor of his cat Pikachu, Steve Munt is raising funds to send Pikachu's remains into space through a space memorial company's service. 

To execute the mission, Munt has agreed to pay $5,000 for a company called Celestis to load a few grams of his cat's remains onto a rocket (whose primary mission is to launch a satellite into orbit) and release them once in space. 

Pikachu won't be the first cat to go into space, if this were to happen. That title belongs to Felicette, a French cat who flew into space and parachuted back to Earth.

If all goes according to plan, Pikachu will become the second cat to enter space. The first, a French stray named Félicette, launched in 1963 aboard the Véronique AG1 rocket, and later safely parachuted back to Earth. The space cat received international media attention, and was even featured on stamp collections.

(Image credit: NASA/Wikimedia Commons)

I wouldn't dare go near any snake but apparently someone from 450 CE not only went near a rattlesnake, out of all the snakes, and ate it whole. How were archaeologists able to say that? Well, they have poo to prove it.

The desiccated coprolite—archaeologists’ term for ancient poop—contained the scales and bones of the snake along with remnants of a small rodent and an assortment of edible desert plants. It’s a great example of how coprolites can give archaeologist a direct (sometimes unnervingly direct) look at what ancient people ate.

The remains were found in the Chihuahuan Desert and scientists are trying to figure out how this came about. Was it a normal part of those ancient peoples' diet? Or perhaps it might have had some cultural or religious significance, as in a ritual of some sort?

For now, there is no way of knowing why, until they can excavate further artifacts that may serve as a clue to figure out why somebody had eaten a rattlesnake whole. Nonetheless, it must have been a very difficult feat to do. Even though there are people who eat snakes, eating one whole is unheard of. So we will have to wait and see what comes up in the research.

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Children have the most adorable ways of communicating certain things and they have no bones about it. They will say what's on their minds without any self-editing mechanism because they haven't been exposed to a world of cues and subtle meanings behind body language and other forms of communication. It's savage but also cute.

A preschool teacher has to deal with all the issues children are concerned with every single day. They are the ones who have to mediate between tattling children. But if you're handling a dozen or twenty children in a class, it can get very tiresome. So what one preschool teacher did was to install a tattle phone where kids can tattle into which was recorded with permission.

Here are a few excerpts from the recording:

David Kestenbaum

OK. So I brought the phone into class, and I set it up. And the kids started to use it immediately and with great enthusiasm.

Kid 1

Eli told me a lie.

Kid 2

Seamus wasn't sharing with me, and I don't like it, and I'm very upset.

Kid 3

Nathan farted in my face, and I said, yuck, Nathan.

David Kestenbaum

Catch that one? Nathan farted in my face, and I said, yuck, Nathan. But the real crime?

Kid 3

And he didn't say excuse me.

The full transcript and podcast are on This American Life. -via MetaFilter

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Ripples or disturbances in space-time called gravitational waves have been theorized by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity but they have only been recently detected, confirming their existence. The first instance was in August 2016 which was recorded by astronomers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). This was followed up by its detection of a neutron star merger in 2017.

The second such case of gravitational wave detection was believed to have occurred last Thursday. Astronomers say that the gravitational waves might have been caused by a neutron star merger, also the second time that such merger was picked up.

LIGO’s first detection of a neutron star merger came in August 2017, when scientists detected gravitational ripples from a collision that occurred about 130 million light-years away. Astronomers around the world immediately turned their telescopes to the collision’s location in the sky, allowing them to gather a range of observations across the electromagnetic spectrum.

The 2017 detection was the first time an astronomical event had been observed with both light and gravitational waves, ushering in a new era of “multi-messenger astronomy.” The resulting information gave scientists invaluable data on how heavy elements are created, a direct measurement of the expansion of the universe and evidence that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, among other things.

This second observation appears to have been slightly too far away for astronomers to get some of of the data they had hoped for, such as how nuclear matter behaves during the intense explosions.

(Image credit: Dana Berry/NASA/Swift)

The universe we live in is so dynamic and expansive that we may not be able to keep up with it unless we make constant adjustments to our theories about its mechanisms. Astronomers have suggested that with the new rate at which the universe is expanding, scientists may need to revise their theories and add new physics to accommodate the rapid cosmic expansion.

The revised expansion rate is about 10% faster than that predicted by observations of the universe's trajectory shortly after the Big Bang, according to the new research. The study also significantly reduces the probability that this disparity is a coincidence, from 1 in 3,000 to just 1 in 100,000.

"This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke," study lead author Adam Riess, a professor of physics and astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said in a statement.

It's unclear what's driving this surprising acceleration, but many astronomers invoke a mysterious, repulsive force called dark energy.

After making observations and gathering data, Riess and his colleagues recalculated the Hubble constant and found the new figure to be 46 miles (74.03 kilometers) per second per megaparsec, which is quite different from the expected rate which was about 41.9 miles (67.4 km) per second per megaparsec.

(Image credit: NASA/Unsplash)

Learning can be fun depending on the method one uses to instruct or impart information. For kids with visual impairment, they can now learn Braille through LEGOs. The concept is an interesting take on learning through playing and certainly it would be a great way for the children not only to learn but to socialize.

The LEGO Foundation and LEGO Group announced yesterday at a conference in Paris that the company would be launching Braille Bricks kits in 2020. Each set has about 250 bricks containing studs that represent the letters and numbers of the Braille alphabet, which empowers people to learn spelling and punctuation, read books, type on a keyboard, and more.

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Stockholm syndrome is the sympathy that a victim, usually a hostage, develops toward their captor. Whether it is through the prolonged exposure to the captor whereby the victim's perspective is being changed and they see some humanity in the other or the captor's charisma or character persuades the other that they are doing such an act for a noble cause, the end is still the same.

It was first coined after the Norrmalmstorg robbery in which the hostages, four bankers, after being held captive for six days and released thereafter, developed a certain trust for their captor and even considered the police to be the ones endangering their lives.

But behind this whole episode there lurks some subtle perceptions and cultural attitudes that we might have on violent acts such as that. 

But the original Stockholm hostage crisis revealed much more: Due to Olsson’s unique disguise, the robbery served as a commentary on the American outlaw—and demonstrated how poorly this swaggering figure translated.

In particular, most of the Swedish people had been surprised at such a thing happening in their country and would associate it more with other places like the US.

More than this, the hostage taker himself admitted that he was inspired by an American outlaw he saw in a movie which he used to come up with his disguise. And so began the six-day standoff between Jan-Erik Olsson, the captor, and the Swedish police.

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Spreading awareness about autism and getting people to understand the situation families who have members with autism, no matter where in the spectrum they may be located, should help in some way of easing the burden especially from societal forces and pressures such that they wouldn't feel as much discrimination or isolation.

But as much as social awareness about autism could help in dealing with it emotionally so that they may live normal lives, scientists are considering new paths still to address the genetics behind autism in order to hopefully develop treatments for affected individuals.

One such avenue being explored is a drug that has worked in "individual cells and rodents of one form of autism known as Pitt-Hopkins syndrome, which is caused by a specific genetic mutation." Furthermore, the researchers from the Lieber Institute for Brain Development and the Maltz Research Laboratories at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine say they will begin human trials in a year.

Because the genetic cause of Pitt-Hopkins is known, we can study the mutation in the lab to better understand how it changes brain function. The name of the mutated gene is transcription factor 4 (TCF4). It is highly active during early brain development in infancy. When the gene is turned on, it decreases the production of two ion channels. These proteins allow ions (specifically, sodium and potassium) to travel in and out of the cell and are found on the membrane of the brain’s neurons.

Specifically, these ion channels become overly active, modifying how nerve cells function and how they respond to signals from other neurons, and therefore how the brain works. When we tested this in rodent and cell models, we found that the Pitt-Hopkins mutation alters the function of the brain’s neurons, which are ultimately responsible for the cognitive and social abnormalities that we find in people.

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