The secret button at pedestrian crossings

 

Few seem to know about this useful little device, which is surprising because in many areas of the country it can be found on every street... and it saves lives.

What is it?

It's a small, unassuming plastic or metal cone which you can find on the underside of pedestrian crossings.

When the green man lights up to show traffic should stop and it's your turn to cross, the cone starts spinning. It points downwards and has tactile ridges on it. 

What's it doing there?

 

It's there for those people who can't see the lights, like visually impaired or blind people. When they feel it spinning they know they have the right of way.

When crossing a road you can stand near the control box with your hand on the cone and independently know you can cross when it spins, without having to get help from a passer-by, if there is one.

For the rest of the story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-ouch-22706881

Why Sometimes You Don't Have To Sign For A Credit Card Transaction

Why does Starbucks not need my signature on payment receipt when I pay by credit card?

All other restaurants and cafes need my signature on payment receipts when I pay by credit card. How does Starbucks do it without my signature?

This is an operational decision based on risk.

Close your eyes and think for a moment what happens to that little piece of paper with your signature on it.

Now, try to imagine...
All of the credit card paying customers from the 9,462 company-owned Starbucks from all around the world millions of tiny slips of papers with signatures on them being created every day, virtually all of them useless (certain exceptions apply) the human effort (and their related costs) it would take to store, transport, organize and categorize them in such a way that would make it easy to find, in case one of those pieces of paper are actually needed
 

The easiest way to understand the reasoning behind this procedure is familiarize yourself with chargebacks.  A chargeback is when a merchant receives notification from a credit card company claiming their customer is saying, "I never bought that."

A hypothetical example
Say you get your credit card bill at the end of the month.  You examine all the charges or verify them against your receipts.  You discover one item that appears to be a mistake.  "Hey, I've never even been to [company XYZ]," you silently say to yourself. You contact the credit card company, disputing the charge.  The credit card company generates a chargeback notice and sends it to the merchant.  This basically means they have reversed the charge.  The money that has been paid to the merchant for your credit card transaction has now been taken back.  The merchant is now without the sales proceeds and the inventory you presumably took.  They are mad.

For the rest of the story: http://www.quora.com/Starbucks/Why-does-Starbucks-not-need-my-signature-on-payment-receipt-when-I-pay-by-credit-card#

Ruby and Jade Shine Light on Earth's History

  

The 23.1-carat Carmen Lucia Ruby, donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

 

Gem hunters have always been natural geologists, seeking the mother lode long before researchers explained how gems and minerals form.

Now, scientists want to officially link precious gems to their geologic setting, with a new suite of tectonic gemstones that will help researchers and the public recognize the special conditions that create rare gems. 

Their proposal kicks off with ruby and jadeite jade, two rare stones linked to colliding tectonic plates.

"I don't think anyone ever started off looking for gems," said Robert Stern, geoscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas and lead author of the proposal, published May 9 in the journal Geology. "Who was the first person to find a shiny stone? But everybody's always appreciated ideas of beauty, whether or not they understood the natural conditions. We can take advantage of what we know and appreciate them even more," he told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

For the rest of the story: http://www.livescience.com/34772-ruby-jade-tectonic-gemstones.html

Vitamin C and Ibuprofen May Help Stop TB

  

Two cheap and widely available substances, vitamin C and ibuprofen, show promise for helping to treat tuberculosis in laboratory models, according to two new studies.

In one study, researchers in Spain found that the anti-inflammatory drug ibuprofen slowed the formation of tuberculosis lesions in the lungs of mice. Mice infected with TB bacteria that were treated with ibuprofen lived longer than mice not treated with ibuprofen, according to the study published online May 3 in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

In another study, researchers found that vitamin C killed TB bacteria growing in laboratory dishes, including the strains that are resistant to available drugs. That study was published May 21 in the journal Nature Communications.

For the rest of the story: http://www.livescience.com/34768-vitamin-c-ibuprofen-tb.html

Normal of Not? How Coffee Drinking May Brew a Mental Disorder

Coffee drinking could lead to a mental disorder. If you experience five or more symptoms, such as red face, nervousness and restlessness, during or right after your cup of Joe, you may be diagnosed with coffee intoxication.

  

Coffee-drinkers, beware: Your caffeine habit could induce a temporary mental disorder. The new edition of the mental health manual, the DSM-5, lists caffeine intoxication among the many disorders known to psychiatry.

Restlessness, nervousness, excitement, red face, gastrointestinal upset, muscle twitching, rambling speech, sleeplessness, rapid and irregular heartbeat and other symptoms may be familiar to many of us, but they are telltale signs of caffeine intoxication. 

Specifically, a coffee drinker who experiences five or more of these symptoms during or shortly after consuming caffeine could be diagnosed with caffeine intoxication. The intoxication must also meet a standard DSM test: It must cause distress or impair the drinker's ability to function. [10 Odd Facts About Coffee]

For the rest of the story:  http://www.livescience.com/34765-coffee-drinking-is-mental-disorder-dsm.html

Antarctica's Ecosystem Is 33 Million Years Old

The Antarctic drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution was used in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program to dig deep into Antarctic sediments.

  

The modern ecosystem of icy Antarctica is some 33.6 million years old, new research finds, with a system dating back to the formation of the polar ice caps.

The date is revealed by fossilized remnants of plankton found in Antarctic sediments, which show how plankton diversity plummeted when a big chill came along at the end of the Eocene Epoch and the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. Before the transition, Earth was a toastier place, and a wide array of plankton survived even at the poles.

The study, published in the journal Science in April, focused on single-celled plankton called dinoflagellates, which contain materials that fossilize. Before the Eocene-Oligocene transition about 34 million years ago, Antarctic dinoflagellates were extremely diverse. When the ice pack formed, however, only plankton that could survive cold temperatures and a seasonal freeze-melt cycle remained.

For the rest of the story: http://www.livescience.com/34759-antarctica-ecosystem-age-found.html

NASA Telescope May Hunt for Rocky Mars-Size Planets Around 'Failed Stars'

This artist's illustration shows a brown dwarf with a disk of planet-forming material around it. Brown dwarfs are bodies without enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion and become stars.  

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope could be used to find Mars-size alien planets orbiting strange "failed stars" known as brown dwarfs, according to a new proposal by a multinational astronomy team.

The group, led by a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, proposes to use the venerable observatory to find small, rocky exoplanets around brown dwarfs, which are larger than planets but too small to ignite the nuclear fusion reactions that power stars.

Astronomers will seek planets crossing the face of these brown dwarfs, in the hopes that some of them will end up being capable of supporting life as we know it. [9 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]

For the rest of the story: http://www.livescience.com/34758-mars-size-exoplanets-brown-dwarfs.html