C. bipunctatus, formally known as the two-spotted flower beetle is a soft-winged flower beetle that mostly eats aphids and spider mites, so gardeners should be glad to find them around. They do occasionally snack on pollen, but not enough so you’d notice, buddy.

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Introduction
Flatulence is defined as the act of passing flatus through the anus, with some definitions incorporating the experience of excessive gas. Flatulence research has focused largely on disease and symptomology, yet intestinal gas is part of healthy digestion. The value of flatus as an indicator of digestive health has best utility when “excessive” is clearly defined. Nutrition textbooks suggest a normal range of 5 to 20 outputs per day based on fiber intake. However, most investigators have shied away from asking how frequently the average person passes gas. The aim of our study was to capture the flatulence behavior of free living community-dwelling individuals in Australia using noninvasive methods.

Methods
This cross-sectional study was approved by the Low Risk Human Research Ethics Committee of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and reported based on STROBE guidelines. Data were recorded into a purpose-designed mobile phone application (Chart Your Fart) by participants who logged their flatus passages in real time, consistent with experience sampling methods.

…

The primary outcome considered was total flatus per day (fls/d), which was averaged within person and summarized through means and medians.

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Participants recorded entries for a mean of 10 days (range, 3-97 days). The sample mean was 5.0 fls/d (SD, 3.8 fls/d), with a median of 3.8 fls/d (IQR, 2.5-6.2 fls/d); 5085 (79.3%) recorded between 2 and 7 fls/d. Males recorded higher activity than females. The youngest age group reported fewer daily releases compared with all other age groups (Table).

Across-day variation showed a gradual increase with a peak between 6 and 10 pm (Figure). This overlapped with general population total energy and fiber intake,5 with a notable dip in flatulence recordings in the middle of the day.

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Tables are at the link. Men reported 5.2 farts per day; women, 4.8. On average.

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It’s described by the editors thusly:

Crouch’s “Histologist”” Microscope. — Mr. Henry Crouch, of 92 Duncombe Road, London, N., has submitted for our examination the latest model of his “Histologist” microscope, which is specially designed for the use of students, particularly medical students. We give an illustration of the instrument. The coarse adjustment is by the now customary diagonal rack and pinion, and the fine adjustment is of the micrometer screw type. The foot is a claw tripod, and as such is perfectly steady. The stage is of the horseshoe pattern, but in the microscope submitted to us the advantage of this was somewhat discounted by the sub-stage ring being fixed in position beneath the stage. The microscope itself is well made and finished, and is specially designed to withstand the rough wear and tear of a laboratory. There are the usual plane and concave mirrors. The objectives generally supplied are the 2/3-inch, N.A. °28, and 1/6-inch, N.A. °65, both being arranged to work approximately in the same focal plane. The apertures are moderate, as is suitable for histological work ; but the objectives are excellent ones, and will bear favourable comparison with any others in the market at the same price. The price of the 2/3-inch is 15s. and of the 1.6-inch 30s. We had also an opportunity of examining a 1-inch N.A. °26 at 15s., and a 1/12-inch oil immersion N.A. 1°3 at £5. This last was a really fine lens. The microscope, as described above, with double nosepiece, 2/3 and 1/6 inch objectives, two eye-pieces, and mahogany case, is sold at £7 7s., or with Abbé condenser N.A, 1°2, with iris diaphragm, 30s. extra.

“Histology,” if you’re curious, is the counterpart of gross anatomy that requires a microscope. In other words, the anatomy of cells and tissues and the little structures of living things. It’s interesting that this microscope looks a little bit like it grew that way.

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Since circulating its first beams in September 2008, the LHC has pushed the frontiers of science and technology, becoming one of the most ambitious scientific instruments ever built. The accelerator delivered its first proton collisions in 2009 and rapidly established itself as a unique discovery machine – across three operational periods (Runs 1–3), the LHC delivered unprecedented quantities of data to its experiments.

The LHC’s most celebrated achievement came on 4 July 2012, when the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, confirming a mechanism proposed nearly half a century earlier. In the years that followed, the LHC enabled hundreds of major advances, including the discovery of more than 85 hadrons, the setting of exclusion limits on the discovery of new particles, searches into the imbalance between matter and antimatter, exploration of the nature of the quark–gluon plasma, and measurements with important implications for astrophysics. Beyond its scientific output, the LHC drove innovation in accelerator science, superconducting technologies, computing and international collaboration.

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In the LHC caverns, the ATLAS and CMS experiments will undergo extensive upgrades, effectively becoming renewed detectors. To fully exploit the unprecedented performance of the HiLumi LHC, they will need to cope with between 140 and 200 proton–proton collisions in every bunch crossing, compared to around 60 during the last LHC run. This means identifying and selecting the most interesting collisions from more than five billion interactions every second. To meet this challenge, both experiments will completely replace their trigger systems, which are responsible for selecting the most promising events for further analysis. These events will be recorded using advanced new detector technologies, including all-silicon tracking systems with billions of readout channels (far more than in the current detectors), high-precision timing detectors with resolutions of a few tens of picoseconds, and new calorimeter systems capable of operating at megahertz rates.

While no particle beams will circulate during this period, CERN’s scientific activity will remain intense. Thousands of researchers will continue analysing the vast datasets accumulated during the LHC era, extracting new physics results while simultaneously preparing the experiments for the challenges ahead.

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(h/t Splinister)

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It’s a student pilot in front of a screen showing them how to fly without burning the fuel and taking the risks of getting in a plane and taking off. The screen in question is not a television screen showing video. It’s an oscilloscope, showing altitude (as one horizontal line, being displaced vertically as the plane rises and descends) and vertical acceleration (as a shorter horizontal line, moving vertically on the screen). This rather indirect way of mimicking a plane in flight was used to study “the minimum
comfortable approach speeds for carrier-type landings.” They also had fancier simulators that looked like a genuine control panel with all the real gauges and whatnot, and even a “five-degree-of-freedom motion simulator” that is a sort of miniature cockpit mounted on a swivel at the end of a crane arm rigged to spin in a circle.

Which sounds like a very unpleasant carnival ride. Part of what was being tested here was how well people reacted to the machines, how much the test pilots could learn from (and react to) the situations that the simulators were, well, simulating. One of the upshots of the experiments was that it would be a good idea to develop different simulators for different things being tested: airspeed changes, hovering aircraft, different missions, and so on.

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Head, sides of the head, occiput, and hind-neck brilliant metallic golden green, the feathers of the occiput bright blue, narrowly edged with the golden green. Back shining velvety purple ; rump and upper tail-coverts, sooty black. Chin and throat bluish green with an oily gloss. Between the throat and
ear-coverts is a narrow line of fiery crimson, running down into the crimson patch on the upper breast. Feathers of the lower neck greenish purple, edged with crimson in a certain light, and followed by a broad semicircular patch of deep fiery crimson.

…and so on.

It’s better known as the splendid astrapia, a New Guinea bird known for flashy feathers and flashier courtship rituals, involving hopping from branch to branch and croaking like a frog. The males will sometimes do this in large groups, or “leks.”

You know. Leks parties. For birds.

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“The big story is in line with what’s told by archaeologists and historians,” says Erika Hagelberg, an ancient DNA expert at the University of Oslo who was not part of the research team. “It’s the small details of particular sites that are really compelling.” The Estonian site, for example, offers powerful evidence that the crew was a tight-knit group from the same village or town. “Four brothers buried together is new and unique … [and] adds a new dimension,” says Cat Jarman, an archaeologist working for the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, who was not part of the research team.

Over the course of almost 10 years, a team led by geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen assembled samples from across Scandinavia dating to the Viking Age, from about 750 C.E. to 1050 C.E., as well as some earlier and later samples. The team also gathered human remains from burials elsewhere in Europe and beyond that had Viking grave goods or burial styles. “We approached every place where we could see there should exist somehow an association with Vikings,” Willerslev says. Ultimately, the team was able to sequence 442 Viking Age genomes from as far afield as Italy, Ukraine, and the doomed Viking settlements of Greenland.

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Viking-style graves excavated on the United Kingdom’s Orkney islands contained individuals with no Scandinavian DNA, whereas some people buried in Scandinavia had Irish and Scottish parents. And several individuals in Norway were buried as Vikings, but their genes identified them as Saami, an Indigenous group genetically closer to East Asians and Siberians than to Europeans. “These identities aren’t genetic or ethnic, they’re social,” Jarman says. “To have backup for that from DNA is powerful.”

The results also settle a centuries-old argument about the geography of raiding. Sagas written down centuries after the first expeditions suggest Vikings from certain regions favored specific destinations, but other scholars suggested the Viking command of the waves made them equal-opportunity raiders and traders.

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The DNA has raised new questions, too. Study co-author and National Museum of Denmark archaeologist Jette Arneborg says DNA recovered from burials in Greenland shows a mix of Scandinavian men from what is now Norway and women from the British Isles. Yet the artifacts and burials look completely Scandinavian. The women “have British genes but we can’t see them in the archaeology,” she says. “The DNA is going to make us think more about what’s happening here.”

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You can read more about the survey here, in Nature.

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“NASA realized the collaboration that a long-duration mission, like sending a team of humans to Mars, goes far beyond just the members of the crew on the spacecraft. The astronauts have to continue to collaborate with many people on Earth,” Carter said. “To do that effectively requires a large, collaborative—or ‘multiteam’—system.”

To conduct this study, [Michigan State management professor Dorothy R.] Carter and her team collaborated with research volunteers living and working inside NASA’s human exploration space analog, or HERA, capsule at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Participants in the Kesseler Team Leadership Laboratory at Michigan State University acted as Mission Control for the HERA ‘astronauts’ in real-time simulations with different degrees of communication delays. The team then ran the data collected through the simulations through a computer model to mimic a larger sample.

The Project FUSION research team identified “collective attention”—when multiple people from different disciplines focus their attention on the same issue at the same time—as the key mechanism for large, complex, multi-team organizations to solve problems effectively. Carter’s research, recently published in the journal Personnel Psychology, is the first study to directly position collective attention as the central link between communication delays and team performance.

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Carter and her team are producing a set of countermeasure recommendations to help large, complex organizations such as NASA deal with disruptions in collective attention more effectively. They found that interventions that target someone’s experience level with a task (capacity), address message simplicity (clarity) and create a sense of shared leadership among team members (connectivity) can help preserve collective attention in situations with delayed communication.

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This is an ad for the Du Mont Type KC2515 CRT, a screen with a resolution of 0.0015 inches, as it appeared in the July/August 1966 issue of the Journal of the Society for Information Display, which I found on archive.org.

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