The new series will blast off with a special preview broadcast of the premiere episode on the CBS Television Network, and the premiere episode and all subsequent first-run episodes will then be available exclusively in the United States on CBS All Access.

The new program will be the first original series developed specifically for U.S. audiences for CBS All Access, a cross-platform streaming service that brings viewers thousands of episodes from CBS’s current and past seasons on demand, plus the ability to stream their local CBS Television stations live for $5.99 per month. CBS All Access already offers every episode of all previous Star Trek television series.

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.

That's when the world's oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

A striking number of leading mental health experts are concerned enough about the possibility of a Trump presidency that they’re willing to speak out, publicly, about the candidate’s “Textbook narcissistic personality disorder.”

During a recent interview with Vanity Fair, developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, referred to Trump as “remarkably narcissistic,” while clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis  used the term “Textbook narcissistic personality disorder,” to describe Trump.

“He’s very easy to diagnose,” said psychotherapist Charlotte Prozan. “In the first debate, he talked over people and was domineering. He’ll do anything to demean others, like tell Carly Fiorina he doesn’t like her looks. ‘You’re fired!’ would certainly come under lack of empathy. And he wants to deport immigrants, but [two of] his wives have been immigrants.”

Those who discovered master mystery writer Michael Connelly with The Lincoln Lawyer series shouldn't overlook his earlier novels. This prolific writer of almost 30 published novels debuted in 1992 with The Black Echo, a book that promptly scooped up the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. Black Echo introduces readers to the principal character LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch. This folks, is where the Connelly dynasty started.

 

Near Washington D.C., there are two clandes-
tine institutions: the world's most unusual labo-
ratory and a secret CIA training camp.  Drawn to
those sites by a murder, ex-Secret Service  agent
Sean King encounters a dark work of mathema-
ticians, codes, and spies.  His search for answers
soon leads him to more shocking violence - and
an autistic girl with an extraordinary genius.
Now, only by working with his embattled partner,
Michelle Maxwell, can he catch a killer ... and
solve a stunning mystery that threatens the entire
nation.

Conservatives and liberals really are wired differently. Scientists can accurately predict whether a subject is left-wing tree-hugger or a right-wing gun-toter based on how their brains respond to certain images, a new study in Current Biology has found.

The test proved surprisingly accurate.  "A single disgusting image was sufficient to predict each subject's political orientation," Montague said.  "I haven't seen such clean predictive results in any other functional imaging experiments in our lab or others." 

So what's the political connection? Evidence suggests that harm avoidance and the need for fairness underlie people's moral judgments in a number of cultures. While liberals rely primarily on these two values, conservatives also rely on desires for group loyalty, authoritative structure, and, most importantly here, purity.

In two large samples (combined N = 31,045), we found a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and political conservatism. This relationship held when controlling for a number of demographic variables as well as the “Big Five” personality traits. Disgust sensitivity was also associated with more conservative voting in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In Study 2, we replicated the disgust sensitivity–conservatism relationship in an international sample of respondents from 121 different countries. Across both samples, contamination disgust, which reflects a heightened concern with interpersonally transmitted disease and pathogens, was most strongly associated with conservatism.

Peering inside the brain with MRI scans, researchers at University College London found that self-described conservative students had a larger amygdala than liberals. The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain that is active during states of fear and anxiety. Liberals had more gray matter at least in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain that helps people cope with complexity.

Conservative fears of nonexistent or overblown boogeymen — Saddam’s WMD, Shariah law, voter fraud, Obama’s radical anti-colonial mind-set, Benghazi, etc. — make it hard not to see conservatism’s prudent risk avoidance as having morphed into a state of near permanent paranoia, especially fueled by recurrent “moral panics,” a sociological phenomenon in which a group of “social entrepreneurs” whips up hysterical fears over a group of relatively powerless “folk devils” who are supposedly threatening the whole social order. Given that conservatism seems to be part of human nature — just as liberalism is — we’re going to need all the help we can get in figuring out how to live with it, without being dominated, controlled and crippled by it.

New Republic: "Fear of Ebola Could Make People More Likely to Vote Conservative."

Wired.com: "Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals, Say Scientists"

Forbes: "Are Political Conservatives Inherently Fearful and Angry?"

Slate.com: "Conservative Politicians Campaign on Fear - And it Works."

Halloween ought to be the Republican presidential candidates’ favorite holiday—they love to scare people. Donald Trump warned us about Mexican rapists and job-stealers; Ted Cruz said people should be afraid of gay marriage because it’s the greatest threat to religious liberty; Ben Carson likened the Obama administration to the Nazis; and Mike Huckabee claimed the Iran deal would lead Israelis to “the door of the oven.”

This rhetoric is based on fear. If you ever find yourself voting from your gut and not your head, take some deep breaths. Nothing good ever comes from fear-driven decisions.

Rational decisions come from weighing the pros and cons of a policy. But when fear enters the equation, people give more weight and importance to some considerations than they actually deserve.

 

  

    

Another photo of such clouds, which was posted in a comment in response to the above photo, was evidently taken somewhere in the USA:



And I have no idea where this third one was taken:



Doing a Google image search for "altocumulous standing lenticular," I found the picture below showing them the way they are expected to be seen, since they are created when warm, moist winds blow up the side of a mountain into cold air:

 

p26-27 "There is a certain speed called the ESCAPE VELOCITY, 25000 mph, that an object must achieve to circle the Earth in stable orbit and not fall down."

Actually the speed needed for circular orbit is less by a factor of
the square root of two, about 18000 mph.

It is true that reading aloud is slower than reading silently. On the other hand, I can listen to audiobooks while doing things that I can’t do while reading.

But I’ve also discovered another advantage to the slower pace of audiobooks: I get more out of the book. When reading a book, especially fiction, I tend to read faster and faster as I get toward the end of the book, excited to see how things come out. Of course, this speed sacrifices some comprehension. I didn’t realize how much comprehension until I listened to an audiobook that I had once read before. The pace of the book is the same throughout. It means that instead of racing at the end, I am continuing on at the same pace as before, and I get more out of the book than I did when I was reading it.

The type of book can also influence how well the information gets absorbed. When the material is difficult, for example, physical reading provides an advantage because the individual can re-read and look to surrounding words for context clues, said University of Memphis professor Arthur Graesser, who studies learning and cognition. In fact, he points out that the studies finding a high correlation between listening and reading comprehension might have had different results had they used complex texts rather than easy ones.And yet in some cases, listening offers major advantages over reading, even with material as tough to parse as Shakespeare. That’s because an audio book pre-determines an aspect of language called prosody, or the musicality of words. Prosody is how we known that someone is being self-reflective when they ask aloud if they left the gas on (or when Hamlet asks whether “to be or not to be”).

“Someone who knows the meaning can convey a lot through prosody,” Willingham said. “If you’re listening to a poem, the prosody might help you.”

Moreover, we are more likely to stick with a book that we’re listening to than one we’re reading, Graesser said, which would also improve our chances of retaining what’s in it.

“The half-life for listening is much longer than for reading,” he said, because we are pre-conditioned to listen to an entire conversation out of politeness. Generally, people keep listening until there is a pause in an idea, but (especially in today’s information-overload age), we stop reading at the slightest suggestion that something more interesting might be going on elsewhere else.

Mahatma Gandhi once wrote: The Roots of Violence: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, Politics without principles.

if electricity is flowing inside a copper loop, its energy dissipates within a fraction of a second because of the resistance of the wire. However, experiments have shown that electricity within a superconducting loop can remain constant for years at a time. The experimental evidence points to a lifetime of 100,000 years for currents inside a superconducting coil. Some theories maintain that the maximum limit for such an electrical current in a superconductor is the lifetime of the known universe itself.

So far, the world record for these new ceramic superconductors is 138 degrees (Kelvin) above absolute zero (or -211° F). This is significant, since liquid nitrogen (which costs as little as milk) forms at 77° K (-321° F) and hence can be used to cool these ceramics. This fact alone has drastically cut the costs of superconductors. So these high-temperature superconductors have immediate practical applications. But these ceramic superconductors have just whetted the appetite of physicists. They are a giant step in the right direction, but still they are not enough. First, although liquid nitrogen is relatively cheap, you still have to have some refrigeration equipment to cool the nitrogen. Second, these ceramics are difficult to mold into wires. Third, physicists are still bewildered by the nature of these ceramics. After several decades, physicists are not quite sure how they work. The quantum theory of these ceramics is too complicated to solve at the present time, so no one knows why they become superconductors. Physicists are clueless. There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the enterprising individual who can explain these high-temperature superconductors.

Without any extra input of energy, room temperature superconductors could produce supermagnets capable of lifting trains and cars so they hover above the ground. One simple demonstration of this power can be done in any lab. I’ve done it several times myself for BBC-TV and the Science Channel. It’s possible to order a small piece of ceramic high-temperature superconductor from a scientific supply company. It’s a tough, gray ceramic about an inch in size. Then you can buy some liquid nitrogen from a dairy supply company. You place the ceramic in a plastic dish and gently pour the liquid nitrogen over it. The nitrogen starts to boil furiously as it hits the ceramic. Wait until the nitrogen stops boiling, then place a tiny magnet on top of the ceramic. Magically, the magnet floats in midair. If you tap the magnet, it starts to spin by itself. In that tiny dish, you may be staring at the future of transportation around the world. The reason the magnet floats is simple. Magnetic lines of force cannot penetrate a superconductor. This is the Meissner effect. (When a magnetic field is applied to a superconductor, a small electric current forms on the surface and cancels it, so the magnetic field is expelled from the superconductor.) When you place the magnet on top of the ceramic, its field lines bunch up since they cannot pass through the ceramic. This creates a “cushion” of magnetic field lines, which are all squeezed together, thereby pushing the magnet away from the ceramic, making it float.

On the World Wide Web, for example, 29 percent of visitors log on in English, followed by 22 percent in Chinese, 8 percent in Spanish, 6 percent in Japanese, and 5 percent in French. English is already the de facto planetary language of science, finance, business, and entertainment. English is the number-one second language on the planet. No matter where I travel, I find that English has emerged as the lingua franca. In Asia, for example, when Vietnamese, Japanese, and Chinese are in a meeting, they use English to communicate.

I hadn't really thought about people logging onto the Internet in Chinese.  There are tens of thousands of Chinese characters, since each character represents a thing or idea instead of just a letter of the "alphabet."  Here's a tiny sample:   



Here's what a Chinese computer keyboard looks like: