We received a note from Johannes Wiebus, a senior producer at Jynx Productions, this morning. He’s working on a documentary about Arc Attack, an Austin, Texas band whose members regularly perform with electrified Tesla coils, using them to make strange, resonant music. Johannes writes of the video above, “A guy in a chain mail Faraday suit is getting hit with 500,000 volts, generated by a home made Tesla Coil.  Lightning is shooting out of his hands, right over our camera’s lens. We had mounted the camera in its own Faraday cage to protect it—and to attract the sparks.”

More on Arc Attack here.

Are you fans of the Science Creative Quarterly? They’re a sort of small Canadian McSweeneys, only they’re all about science. One thing they’re doing this year, to celebrate the International Year of Biodiversity, is something they call their Phylomon Project. They’re soliciting designs for what they envision as being a Pokemon-type card set, as well as ideas for what sorts of games one might play with such a set.

If you’re interested, you can submit illustrations to their Flickr group.

A Japanese astronaut is tweeting photos from space. That up there is a view of Pico De Orizaba, the highest mountain in Mexico.

THIS IS SO FUCKING COOL. More photos on his Twitpic page here.

A Bristol University poll shows cat owners are more likely to have a university degree than dog owners. Ha. 

Johns Hopkins researchers confirm what we’ve all always suspected—it is your mom’s fault that you’re always getting lost!

“We found that people with a rare genetic disorder cannot use one of the very basic systems of navigation that is present in humans as early as 18 months and shared across a wide range of species,” Landau said. “To our knowledge, this is the first evidence from human studies of a link between the missing genes and the system that we use to reorient ourselves in space.”

More detail here. Thank goodness for smart phones, eh?

...or not.

(PHOTO: DeaPeaJay)

From Proto magazine comes a nice round-up of the latest advances in restoring vision, including artificial retinas (like hearing aids for your eyes), gene therapy, and stem-cell treatments that may be able to regrow damaged retina cells.

The piece has a great opening line: “How many electrodes can fit on the back of an eye?” (Answer: In about five years, hopefully 1,000.)

(PHOTO: Jeff the Trojan)

A Spanish experimental psychologist has just concluded that left-handed people like things on the left better than things on the right, unlike right-handed people, who like things on the right better than things on the left.

In one of his experiments, Casasanto presented participants a diagram that depicts a character who was planning a trip to the zoo, and who loves zebras and thinks they are good, but dislikes pandas and thinks they are bad. The participant had to draw a zebra in the box that best represented good things and a panda in the box that best represented bad things.

You can read the press release here. I kind of love it.

(PHOTO: Ohadweb)

The New York Time’s Economix blog, which reports (rather sassily) about what it calls the science of everyday life, recently linked to an Australian study of happiness and divorce rates in a post entitled Don’t Become Happier Than Your Wife. As someone who had a rather dispiriting 2009 and whose husband is happily ensconced in graduate school right now, doing exactly what he loves doing most, I raised an eyebrow.

Using a meta-analysis of three large sample surveys that include questions about happiness, and correlating this with divorce data, the authors found that “an increase in the happiness gap by 1% raises the probability of separation by 0.24% in Germany (GSOEP), 0.3% in Australia (HILDA) and 0.1% in the United-Kingdom (BHPS).” (This may sound small, but the average risk of breakup in the samples, they claim, is only 1.8% to begin with.)

From the paper itself:

...we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first year of marriage, increases the likelihood of a future separation. We interpret this as the effect of comparisons of well-being between spouses, i.e. aversion to unequal sharing of wellbeing inside couples. Couples are more likely to break-up when the difference in life satisfaction is unfavourable to the wife. The information available in the Australian survey reveals that divorces are indeed predominantly initiated by women, and importantly, by women who are unhappier than their husband.

You can read the entire paper here. As for me, when my husband’s experiments don’t go as well as he hopes, maybe I’ll just tell him his frustration is an investment in our long-term future. 

(PHOTO: Philip Guo

Stanford Computer Science PhD candidate Philip Guo has a section on his website entitled Observations about People. His latest report, Geek behaviors present during conversations, chronicles “common behaviors I’ve observed from my past few years of interactions with geeks, nerds, and other highly-smart technical people.”

Here’s my favorite bit:

Preferring exact numerical responses
Geeks favor accuracy and correctness over ease-of-comprehension for their listeners. If you ask a geek a question requiring a numerical answer and he knows the exact number, then he will likely repeat it verbatim rather than rounding to present an easier-to-remember response (e.g., “that camera is 4.2 megapixels” rather than “that camera is around 4 megapixels").

Philip’s full report is here.

(PHOTO: Jose Luis Rodriguez)

Look! It’s the prizewinning entry in the BBC Wildlife Magazine and London’s Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Neat, huh? It’s an awesome photo of an Iberian gray wolf leaping towards its prey! Nature! Wildness! Caught in action! The judges were thrilled!

Oh, snap. Turns out it was all a con. (Probably.)

In a shocking update released today, the photo has been officially disqualified and stripped of its award after the judging panel decided the wolf shown in it was probably a trained hired model, not a wild animal. According to the BBC, “the judging panel looked at a range of evidence and took specialist advice from panel judges who have extensive experience of photographing wildlife including wolves,” before coming to the conclusion that they’d been duped.

The shocking revelation can be found here; the original story about the win is here. The photographer (who had previously explained that the photo was the result of years of planning and even design sketches—somehow this did not catch anyone’s attention) denies any chicanery.