3D-Print Your Laugh and Launch It Into Space

Are you a chortler? What about guffaws, giggles or hyena laughs? If you have the best laugh, whatever the joyful sound, it could end up getting turned into a 3D-printed sculpture sent into space.

Israeli artist and computer programmer Eyal Gever is leading this collaborative project called #Laugh. Six years ago the 3-D manufacturing company Made In Space offered Gever the opportunity to become the first artist to create a piece in outer space. They're the folks behind the zero gravity 3-D printer launched to the International Space Station in 2014, which astronauts used to successfully print new parts.

In coming up with #Laugh, Gever had to come up with art that would have universal appeal, literally. The final piece couldn't be specific to any particular country or culture. His friend, the British spoken word poet Suli Breaks, suggested laughter. Gever is using crowdsourcing to gather laughter submissions and identify the most popular audio, which he'll turn into a file transmitted to Made In Space's 3-D printer aboard the ISS. The resulting sculpture will get released into space.

In describing the project online, Gever referenced early cave paintings of human hands. He called them a way of proclaiming and celebrating humanity's presence. "#Laugh will be the 21st Century version of that — a mathematically accurate encapsulation of human laughter, simply floating through space, waiting to be discovered," he said.

That does sound kind of cheesy, but I'm interested to see the final result. Gever's other projects are wild. He melds tech and art, developing his own engines to create physical works in three dimensions. Imagine a computer simulation that looks like a slice of ocean waves. Now picture that turned into a 3-D printed sculpture. Surreal is definitely the word.

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In order to participate, you need to download the free #Laugh app from iTunes, which only works on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices that have iOS 7.0 or later. That knocks out a large segment of the world's population, but OK. Laughs submitted through the app have until midnight on December 31 to garner the most "likes" on social media.

The crowd-selected laugh audio submission will be announced next month and then heads to the International Space Station in February to emerge as a very strange star.

When I tried downloading the app, unfortunately it got stuck after the intro on a screen that said "loading." So I guess it's a sign from the universe. Either that or everyone else is getting the last laugh. Heh heh.

'Mythical' Sea Blob Finally Spotted a Century After Its Discovery

A mysterious sea blob that looks like a psychedelic Slinky has finally been spotted, more than a century after it was first described.

The translucent, sea-dwelling invertebrate, called Bathochordaeus charon, was identified recently off the coast of Monterey, California, by scientists using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Though B. charon was first discovered a century ago, no one had managed to confirm its existence in all those years, Rob Sherlock, a scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who found the creature, told Live Science in an email. [See Photos of the Translucent Sea Blob]

Mysterious sea creature

B. charon belongs to a group of sea creatures known as larvaceans — normally teensy, millimeter-size creatures whose bodies resemble a tadpole's, with a large "head" (actually a trunk) and a tail, Sherlock said

Though the sea is teeming with tiny larvaceans, the larger versions, which can have bodies extending up to 3.9 inches (10 centimeters), are much less common. To eat, the sea blob filters food through its shimmering, parachute-like mucus "house" almost 3.3 feet (1 m) in length. By waving its tail, it stirs the water and pulls particles directly into its house. Large particles get trapped and form a fine dusting of marine "snow" on the house, while the smaller particles pass through, concentrating and then funneling into a feeding tube that goes into the mouth, Sherlock said. (The tiny larvaceans also don mucus homes, but they're smaller.)

If a passing squid or fish crashes through the house, or big particles clog the feeding tube, larvaceans simply move on and build another house. Without their houses, they cannot eat, Sherlock said.

First sightings

The first report of B. charon's existence came in 1899, when professor Carl Chun of Leipzig University came across one in the south Atlantic Ocean while leading the Valdivia Expedition, a German mission aimed at exploring the deep sea. Chun believed the creature welled up from the deepest depths of the ocean, so he named the larvacean after Charon, who in Greek mythology ferries the souls of the dead across the river Styx, the researchers reported Aug. 16 in the journal Marine Biodiversity Records.

In the decades that followed, several other naturalists reported spotting giant larvaceans, though only a few were captured alive and described thoroughly. In 1936, for instance, British marine biologist Walter Garstang collected a set of giant larvaceans that differed from Chun's, and they were classified as a new species, Bathochordaeus stygius. [Marine Marvels: Spectacular Photos of Sea Creatures]

Because the two sets of specimens were similar and Chun's originals were lost to history, scientists eventually began to wonder whether Chun's originally described B. charon was actually the same species as B. stygius. One famous larvacean expert even suggested combining the two species names, Sherlock said. Part of the difficulty in capturing these creatures is that they don't fare well in the trawling nets typically used to collect specimens, Sherlock said.

Hiding in plain sight

Sherlock and his colleagues happened upon the new species when the team's ROV, called Doc Ricketts, was exploring the waters of Monterey Bay. As soon as they saw it, the crew carefully collected it in a sealed, thermally insulated container.

"Since the vehicle was recovered some tens of minutes later, the animal was alive, in fantastic shape, and we preserved it right away in order to send it to the Smithsonian," Sherlock said. "We had no idea, until we looked more closely at the specimen, that we had actually found B. charon, the species first described over a hundred years ago."

Genetics and analysis of physical features confirmed the find, Sherlock said. It was official: There really were two distinct species of giant larvacean — B. stygius and B. charon.

"It felt like Chun had finally been vindicated after years of doubt," Sherlock said.

When the team went back over videos from Monterey Bay from the past 25 years, they realized the creature had been spotted many times in the bay. Whether they dwell in places between Monterey Bay and the South Atlantic, however, remains to be seen.

Still, this mythical sea blob is fairly rare; over the course of the past few decades, biologists have seen hundreds of B. stygius, but captured footage of only a dozen B. charon individuals, Sherlock said.

Congressional Tweet About 'Disgraceful' Article Ignores Science

An article casting doubt on climate change that was promoted in a tweet from the U.S. House of Representatives' science committee is "extremely misleading" and "disgraceful," climate scientists told Live Science.

The article in question, written by a staffer at the far-right website Breitbart, contains cherry-picked data that makes it appear as though global temperatures are decreasing, when in reality, 2016 is expected to be the hottest year on record, climate experts said.

The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, which has 179,000 followers on Twitter, posted the story on Thursday (Dec. 1), saying, ".@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists."

The Breitbart story outright ignores the "deleterious impact that our profligate burning of fossil fuels is having on the planet," said Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. [Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice]

"Just weeks from now, 2016 will go down as the hottest year on record, having beaten out the previous warmest year — 2015 — by a substantial margin," Mann told Live Science in an email. "For anyone, least of all the House Committee on Science, to at this particular moment, be promoting fake news aimed at fooling the public into thinking otherwise, can only be interpreted as a deliberate effort to distract and fool the public."

Misleading headline

The problem with the Breitbart story starts with the headline, which states that global temperatures have plunged. However, in a subheading, the author clarified that it's not global temperatures, but rather "global land temperatures" that have decreased.

This clarification is important, because land temperatures fluctuate a lot more than ocean temperatures, said Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. When land and ocean temperatures are combined, it's clear that, overall, global temperatures are indeed increasing, he said.

To illustrate why land temperatures vary more than the ocean's, Trenberth said to imagine a teapot. An empty teapot placed on a hot stove would heat up fairly quickly, but a teapot filled with water would take longer to heat, he said. The land is like the empty teapot; its temperature fluctuates more rapidly with seasonal weather, whereas the water-filled teapot is akin to the ocean. It takes more energy to change its temperature, meaning its temperature doesn't fluctuate as much, he said.

In addition, there are problems with the way the article used data on global land temperatures taken from satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Trenberth said. These satellites measure the temperature of the air several miles from the ground's surface, he said. Usually, when scientists use this data, they combine the satellite numbers with recordings of ground temperatures taken at weather stations around the world, to give a more accurate picture of global land temperatures than can be had from the satellite data alone, Trenberth added.

But the Breitbart piece did not include these warmer ground temperatures, making the land temperatures appear colder than usual, Trenberth said.

"[The tweet] is extremely misleading and it's disgraceful actually, because they get it out to a whole lot of people who don't understand that it's wrong," Trenberth said. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

El Niño

The Breitbart piece claims that the drop in land temperatures was met by "icy silence from climate alarmists." Again, that's not the case, Trenberth said. Scientists fully expected to see a temperature drop, because El Niño has just ended.

El Niño is a phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean in which warm water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean flows eastward toward South America, heating up surface waters off of northwestern South America. These warm waters are more prone to evaporation than cooler waters would be, and they can fuel Pacific hurricanes and other unusual weather events. The El Niño of 2015 and 2016, which ended in June, was among the strongest on record and led to widespread warming while it was occurring, Trenberth said.

"Now, we're in a La Niña," in which oceans absorb heat rather than releasing it as they do during an El Niño, Trenberth said. "This is where it's much cooler along the equator."

He added, "We've been in a La Niña pattern since about summer, but it's only in the last two months or so that it's beginning to have an effect on the weather. It's had a noticeable effect on the atmospheric circulation across the United States in the last couple of months," hence the cool air temperatures measured in October, as Breitbart noted.

Because of La Niña's cooling effects, scientists expect that global temperatures in 2017 will be lower than in 2016, Trenberth said. But in the long run, the global climate is still warming, he said.

Tim Barnett, a research marine physicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, agreed.

"If the temperature changes from one year to the next year, so what? That's natural variability, or something else that's not global warming," Barnett told Live Science. "People really need to stand back and look at the record from a 20-year period to get a good feel. And when you do that, it's very clear that there's an upward trend."

This isn't the first time the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology has raised doubts about climate change on Twitter, but other elected officials tweeted back, refuting the Breitbart story. They included Rep. Don Beyer (D-Virginia), who tweeted, "This isn't factual. It's embarrassing, and Breitbart is not a credible news source. We need to bring *science* back to the science committee."

Live Science reached out to the committee for a comment on scientists' criticism of the tweet, but did not hear back by press time.