{"id":12906,"date":"2015-01-02T11:26:28","date_gmt":"2015-01-02T03:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=12906"},"modified":"2015-01-02T22:32:08","modified_gmt":"2015-01-02T14:32:08","slug":"recent-interesting-science-articles-december-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=12906","title":{"rendered":"Recent Interesting Science Articles (December 2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s the last of this series for the year, so let&#8217;s get cracking.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The first one of these is more boosterism than anything else, but it&#8217;s hard not to feel especially enthused about space development after the successful comet landing last month. This <em>Bloomberg<\/em>\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2014-12-05\/nasa-launches-orion-capsule-in-test-for-2030s-mars-trip.html\">article<\/a> talks about the successful initial test of NASA&#8217;s <strong>Orion spacecraft<\/strong>, the platform that should eventually carry humans back to the moon and beyond. Of course, this is just an unmanned test of the crew module and they don&#8217;t even have a rocket, but progress is progress.<\/li>\n<li>The next article is more boosterism. It is in fact an <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/re-form\/click-clack-clunk-how-the-perfect-car-door-sound-is-made-and-why-it-matters-2cf867983a34\">advertorial<\/a> from BWM but I found it fascinating enough to link to here (and not be paid for it). It talks about how modern car engineers spend a lot of time and effort on carefully designing what <strong>sound<\/strong> a car makes when you close its doors. Apparently consumers expect to hear different types of sounds depending on what type of car it is and are more influenced by the sound they hear than they are consciously aware of.<\/li>\n<li>The next <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/sciencetech\/article-2877855\/Cemetery-one-MILLION-mummies-unearthed-Egypt-1-500-year-old-desert-necropolis-largest-found.html#ixzz3MLzYYTsL\">link<\/a> goes to the <em>Daily Mail<\/em>\u00a0(sorry about that) but it&#8217;s about real science. It&#8217;s about the discovery of the largest <strong>desert necropolis<\/strong> ever in Egypt. So far some 1,700 mummified corpses have been found but calculations based on the area of the burial grounds suggest that the mass cemetery holds over a million corpses. They are said to date from around 1,500 years ago and are common citizens instead of royalty. No doubt it will be an important archaeological resource for decades to come.<\/li>\n<li>This one is great just for the reading pleasure alone. It is a <em>New York Times<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/25\/science\/solving-the-riddles-of-an-early-astronomical-calculator.html?ref=technology&amp;_r=4\">article<\/a> about the <strong>Antikythera Mechanism<\/strong>, an astronomical calculator that dates back to around 100 BC. It can be considered a very early computer, though it is not programmable. It can be\u00a0used to predict\u00a0lunar and solar eclipses and calculate the positions the sun, the moon and the other planets in the solar system.<\/li>\n<li>Finally everyone knows how bad the <strong>air pollution<\/strong> in China&#8217;s big cities is, but I enjoyed this <em>Guardian<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/cities\/2014\/dec\/16\/beijing-airpocalypse-city-almost-uninhabitable-pollution-china?CMP=share_btn_tw\">article<\/a>. It\u00a0covers not only how the population has adapted to the situation over time but also some of the suggestions of how to deal with it, including outlandish proposals like large-scale\u00a0vacuum cleaners to suck the smog out of the sky.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s the last of this series for the year, so let&#8217;s get cracking. The first one of these is more boosterism than anything else, but it&#8217;s hard not to feel especially enthused about space development after the successful comet landing last month. This Bloomberg\u00a0article talks about the successful initial test of NASA&#8217;s Orion spacecraft, the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=12906\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Recent Interesting Science Articles (December 2014)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12906"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12917,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12906\/revisions\/12917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}