Credit: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

The science behind reading faces is fascinating.  Sometimes it's obvious when someone is confused, happy,  sad, angry, distracted etc. and other times what you can see in someone's face is subtle and hard to read.  Distilling facial expressions into mathematical formulas that can be put into a computer program, with the panoply of human emotions we all experience and observe in others, must be really hard.

A computer scientist at UC San Diego is trying to do just that. Jacob Whitehill is hoping to create a facial recognition system that can determine if students understand or are confused by what they are hearing.

The goal is facial recognition software that can tell robotic teachers to slow down or speed up when giving instruction.

There may be a market for robotic teachers someday in some capacities, but I'll always prefer being taught by humans like John Ludgate, who I had for math my sophomore year of high school. He used to stand at the front of the room, bouncing a piece of chalk in his hand as he patiently tried to explain concepts in trigonometry, like the differences between sine and cosine.

Like a lot of teachers, he had to spend far too much time maintaining order in a classroom with about 30 hyperactive, hormonal and at times hyena-like 15-year-old kids. It might have been good training for him: he ended up joining the Peace Corps and going to Africa. I don't know what happened to him from there.

There's more on Whitehill's work here.

Here are some of the details, from the USGS. The Georgia papers said few residents of the area reported feeling anything.

The quake was the second small event in the region in recent days. The USGS also reported a 1.9 shake near Robbinsville, NC on Saturday.  The two spots are marked in blue on this map.

Sometimes finding a current picture of the International Space Station can be a problem. Plenty of images have been shot, the best ones by astronauts aboard one of NASA's space shuttles, just before docking or just after undocking.

The problem is that almost every time a shuttle crew visits the station, they tote along a new module, or a new set of solar panels, or radiators, or some other gadget or gizmo that changes the looks of the place. Or, spacewalking crews move stuff around. They'll detach solar panels from one spot, and move it to another spot as the framework to hold them grows.

Anyway, here (above) is an image just released showing the station as it looked earlier this month as the shuttle Discovery backed away after delivering the Japanese Kibo science module. It's the latest, best portrait of the station as it currently exists. Or, at least as it looked while the Russian cargo transport Progress (left) was attached. It's the section at the center of the image with the X-shaped solar panels. If it's not gone already, it will be before long. The changes in the station over the years, and consequently its brightness when observed from the ground, have changed dramatically. Here, for example, is how it looked in 2006.

And here is how it looked in 2002. And finally here is how it looked in 2000 when it consisted of two Russian segments and one NASA segment called Unity.

In two more years NASA is scheduled to shut down its shuttle program. After that, we'll have to wait for the debut of the Ares program before we'll have the capability in the U.S. of launching manned vehicles to the ISS or anywhere else. We'll be relying on the Russians to put astronauts aboard the ISS.

Mostly the Ares series is being built to serve NASA's manned lunar landing hardware program, called Constellation, which will add the manned Orion capsules to the Ares boosters. 

The Ares V is expected to be capable of putting 286,000 pounds into low Earth orbit, comparable to the old Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the moon in the late '60s and early '70s. The space shuttle's lift capacity is about 50,000 pounds.

Even squirrels have gotten the message: coffee will extend your life span. At least if you're a woman. 

A study out this week says that regular coffee drinking can have a protective effect. It  defines regular drinking as up to 6 cups a day.

The findings are based on surveys taken by thousand of men and women, who answered questions about their health, diet and lifestyle every few years. The researchers analyzed answers given by 84,214 women in the Nurses' Health Study and 41,736 men participating in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Participants completed questionnaires every two to four years.

The results, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, show women consuming two to three cups of caffeinated coffee per day had a 25 percent lower risk of death from heart disease between 1980 and 2004, and an 18 percent lower risk of death caused by something other than cancer or heart disease. There were no differences detected among the men, who were tracked from 1986 to 2004.

The researchers accounted for other risk factors, such as body size, smoking, diet, and specific diseases, in their results.

So what's with the squirrel? The  photo came to us courtesy of the Associated Press and was taken in 2004 in Saginaw, Mich. by David A. Sommers of The Saginaw News. I just think it's funny.

There's more on the study here.

There's word today that the GLAST spacecraft described in a Sun story here is safely in orbit 350 miles above the earth and running smoothly. It launched from Cape Canaveral June 11.

The solar arrays or "wings" that will power it have begun working, the software to control its heating system has been activated and it began tracking its first stars June 16.

Now, engineers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt will spend the next four weeks turning on and checking out the various components on the spacecraft.

GLAST will survey the entire sky every three hours.

I hate when science writers get gee-whiz about their subjects, but this is really cool stuff, so I guess I'm doing it here: The mission is aimed at trying to decipher the who, what, where and why of gamma ray bursts, which originate in black holes, shoot out across space in little understood tubular formations and are one of the most powerful sources of energy ever discovered.

The mission's an international affair, with the lead U.S. agencies NASA and the Department of Energy, but there are important contributions from universities and partners in France, Italy, Japan and Sweden.

There's more on the mission here.

The Sun/Amy Davis

There's a report published today in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that has a major Awww factor. You read about it and you say "Awww, is't that nice."

Researchers observed chimps in a zoo in England for a year and nine months and noted that when one gets injured, comrades will come and comfort the victim with kisses and hugs. What  they also discovered is that when comforted, a victim tends to exhibit less stress-like behavior, such as self-grooming and scratching.

The Associated Press story notes that the same type of comforting behavior has been occasionally observed in certain types of birds and dogs. There also have been unconfirmed reports of it, on rare occasions, in humans .

There's more on the report here. 

The first data from the cooker - analyzing the chemical contents of the dirt - are due back shortly. For a gallery of Phoenix images, click here.

Eastern garter snakes are more typically 20 to 24 inches long, with three yellow or light-colored lines down their bodies. The only thing close to the black rat snake in these parts is the Eastern king snake - black with a yellow chain pattern on its back, but it's not common in the suburbs.

Rat snakes have become part of suburbia. "More and more are showing up in suburban areas," Bosmans told me. There are plenty of rats and mice to sustain them, and "people don't kill snakes the way they used to, which is good." 

What's really good about them, aside from keeping down the rodent population, is that black rat snakes are not venomous. While they may bite in self-defense if picked up and handled, the bite won't do much damage. You can avoid the issue entirely by simply leaving them alone.

It's interesting that these people have spotted them in pairs, or groups. "June is mating season for most snakes," Bosmans said. "The females make a scent, and the males often follow them." The female will soon lay her eggs, typically in a mulch pile, compost, or in a hollow log. There may be anywhere from 12 to 40 of them, and they'd incubate in the warmth of summer, hatching in September or October. They hatch gray, with rectangular markings.

Most of the young won't survive. Dehydration, rodents, cars or hawks will get them. Those that do survive will grow to be five feet long, sometimes as big as 6 or 7 feet.  They're black as adults, with white undersides. 

Mild winters like the last one mean more snakes will survive to mate and reproduce. But that's a good thing, Bosmans insists. "If people see a snake, it's a good sign. A lot of reptiles is ... a sign of a clean environment."

That means turtles, too. Box turtles and snappers are on the move and laying their eggs at this time of year. "Leave them alone," he urges. "Nature will take care of the eggs. If you see [a turtle] on the road, and you can stop safely, move it off the road in the direction it was moving."

He also invites readers to visit his website. Ray is president of the Mid-Atlantic Turtle and Tortoise Society.

 NASA and the European Space Agency are planning to pull the plug on Ulysses on July 1, ending the only mission ever sent to orbit over the north and south poles of the sun, rather than circling in the same plane as the planets. Launched in 1990, Ulysses flew out to Jupiter and used the giant planet's gravity to bend its trajectory so that it dove "down," below the orbital plane of the planets. It then circled back under the sun, swept "up" again and began its exploration of a region of the solar system that had never been visited before.  In two Jupiter flybys, it also added to our understanding of the Jovian system.

The mission lasted four times longer than its designers planned, and the German-built, NASA-powered craft has provided scientists with a long list or surprises and discoveries. You can read more about it here.

They're calling it the "Snow Queen," for reasons we shall not touch on here. But it is the highlight of a spectacular photo mosaic sent back by NASA's Phoenix Mars lander.

It reveals an apparent layer of smooth ice, lying just beneath a thin layer of dirt that was blasted aside as NASA's Mars Phoenix lander touched down a couple of weeks ago.

The mission's prime objective is to document the presence of water ice in the Martian arctic, and to test for the presence of life - past or present - in what once was a much wetter planet.

It appears that the first objective may already have been met, at least in part. Hard to imagine what the Snow Queen might be if it isn't ice of some sort. It looks as if the lander's landing retro-rockets not only blew aside the thin layer of soil at the landing spot, but also briefly melted the ice. It looks as though the ice softened, and flowed a bit before refreezing. Or perhaps the thrusters melted those little holes in the ice.

In any event it is a most intriguing image, and far more than the mission's planners expected to see when they maneuvered the camera arm under the spacecraft. Also visible, just to the right of the footpad, is a tiny white spring, partially buried in the dirt. It's believed to be from the "bio-barrier" door that was opened after landing. Our littering of Mars continues.

NASA

I'm blogging about a NASA launch today because it gives me a chance to post the wonderful image above, which is today's launch of the GLAST spacecraft from Cape Canaveral. I know a little bit about GLAST -- but not that much -- because I wrote a story about it that appeared in the paper on Monday.

 It was one of the those stories that I wish I had more time on (I had two days) because the idea and the history behind the $690 million mission is fascinating. The idea is to use a form of light we cannot see to study and trace the origins of one of the most powerful forms of energy known -- gamma ray bursts.

 The history of what we know about gamma rays in space goes back to the Cold War and our concern about Russia's nuclear capabilities.

One point to start with: The light we see around us is only a small part of the light in the electromagnetic spectrum, and several telescopes now use types of light beyond the visible portion of the spectrum to peer out into the universe.

The famous Chandra telescope uses X-rays and there's another called the Spitzer telescope that "sees" stellar objects in the infrared portion of the spectrum. This all might be basic stuff to you science blog types, but it still fascinates me that we're learning so much about the universe these days by studying objects that we could never see with our own eyes.

GLAST stands for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope and it is designed to detect gamma ray bursts -- mysterious high energy bursts --- pinpoint their origin and shed light on the black holes that spawn most of them. GLAST's operations will be managed over the next five to 10 years by engineers and scientists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt.

Now the history lesson: In the 1960s, the U.S. signed a treaty with the Soviets to limit testing of nuclear weapons, but we were worried that the Russians would cheat by testing their nuclear capabilities in space. So the U.S. government asked scientists if there was a way to monitor what was going on in the heavens and secretly, they found a way: launch a satellite capable of detecting the signatures left by gamma ray bursts -- forms of high energy radiation that would be created by a nuclear blast in space.

The scientists in charge didn't find any bursts coming from any Earth-based systems, but instead they saw these incredible blasts coming from outer space. A complete suprise that no one could explain. But their existence remained classified until 1973.

Beginning in 1991, an instrument known as the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory began nine years of collecting data, suggesting that the bursts come from all over distant galaxies. GLAST builds on that history.

You can read about today's launch here. 

A sad tale, but true. More than two dozen dolphins died after they beached on the shore of Cornwall, England, according to an article in the Guardian today.

The bodies of 26 dolphins washed up on four different sites on the Percuil river. Some were still alive and guided back to sea. The dolphins' lungs and stomachs were filled with mud, suggesting they may have intentionally swallowed and inhaled the mud.

Veterinarians interviewed by the Guardian compared the incident to a mass suicide. The report didn't identify the species of the dolphins, but from the photo above, they look like the Common dolphin, (Delphinus delphis).

Very disturbing indeed. But what would push a pod of dolphins over the edge? The Royal Navy was using sonar for a live-fire excersice nearby, prompting the Guardian to theorize that the dolphins might have been disturbed by the noise. Fear of a killer whale or infection were also raised as possible causes.

An increasing number of dwarf sperm whales, Kogia simus, and pygmy sperm whales, Kogia breviceps, have been stranded on beaches. The heart condition is common in the whales. So it isn't too much of a stretch to implicate some kind of infection in the dolphin case. But that still leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

Why did they all wash up at the same time? Why the mud in their lungs and stomachs? The Royal Navy denied that its use of sonar was the cause. But in 2000, the U.S. Navy acknowledged that ship sonar probably caused a whale beaching in the Bahamas. Sonar was also suspected in 2006, when 400 bottlenose dophins beached in Zanzibar, Tanzania, where the U.S Navy patrolled as part of counter-terrorism efforts.

In that case, the autopsies revealed the dolphins' stomachs were empty, suggesting they had either not eaten in a long time or vomited up their food.

Environmental groups like the Ocean Mammal Institute have sued the U.S. Navy in an attempt to stop its use of sonar near the Hawaiian islands and elsewhere. However, in an environmental impact report released last month the Navy concluded that there was no evidence that sonar had led to dolphin strandings, and that it planned to keep its sonar use at current levels. Sounds like a real mystery of the deep.

The IAU, which is the internationally recognized authority for naming and categorizing celestial objects, has created a new family of dwarf planets called "plutoids." And the first two (and so far only known) members of the family are Pluto and Eris.

Never heard of Eris? No wonder. It was discovered just five years ago by a team at the Palomar Observatory, and named for the Greek goddess of strife and discord. It's orbiting the sun three times farther out than Pluto. Astronomers estimate it is about 2,500 kilometers in diameter, and 27 percent more massive than Pluto. That makes it the ninth largest object known to be orbiting the sun. Eris (pictured in an artist's rendering at left) has a satellite of its own, dubbed Dysnomia, the daughter of Eris and demon of lawlessness. Nice.

Anyway, the IAU has decided than any object that's orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Neptune, and large enough for its own gravity to pull it into a spherical shape, will henceforth be classified as a plutoid. And while there are just two such objects so far - Pluto and Eris - scientists are confident they will find more.

Telescopic searches and the voyage of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will be looking. New Horizons (at right), built and managed at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab near Laurel, is due to fly by Pluto in 2015. From there it will cruise out into the icy regions beyond, where more plutoids are likely lurking.

The solar system's only other known dwarf planet is the asteroid Ceres. It's big and spherical, too, but because it orbits the sun in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, it's not a plutoid. Astronomers believe Ceres is the only object of its kind, so it likely will not be categorized in any other way.

The term "plutoid" was coined by the IAU's Committee on Small Body Nomenclature and accepted by the IAU Executive Committee meeting in Oslo, Norway.

Bloomberg News

It's official: we're eating more.

For years, health experts have been wondering whether the world's obesity epidemic could be traced to people not getting as much exercise as they used to, or eating more, or both.

 My guess was always that it was both, but I also think labor saving devices were part of the problem. When is the last time you saw a TV without a remote control, or were in a car without power windows. You don't have to get up and answer the phone. It's in your pocket.

Anyway, it turns out I was wrong. Kind of.

 A lot of studies have depended on self reporting of people's eating and exercise habits, which is terribly inaccurate. But to get reliable info, researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and the University of Aberdeen in the U.K. turned to studies where volunteers were given trace amounts of water molecules with hydrogen or oxygen atoms containing extra neutrons.

The body draws on the oxygen atoms for metabolism, expelling some of them in carbon dioxide.  By tracking what's in the urine, researchers can estimate a person's overall rate of metabolism.

The researchers analyzed results of a 20-year public health study of 366 Maastricht residents where the method was used and compared it with findings from studies conducted in the United States and the developing world.

 They found people are burning just as many calories as they ever did -- so they're  moving around and exercising as much.  The daily expenditure of energy was in fact, similar across studies throughout the period, whether the people were in Europe, the United States, or elsewhere.

For most people, daily physical activity levels haven't changed, the researchers say. The time spent watching television and on computers  today is the same as it was years ago. The difference is people probably listened to the radio in the 1950s or read books in the 1920s, they say.

But -- get this -- over the same 20-year period, obesity prevalence doubled in the Netherlands and more than tripled in the United States.

There's more on the study here.