The Great Beyond

Power problems on the International Space Station will be somewhat mitigated by a successful repair job on one of the station’s solar panels. This still leaves a tear in one panel and a problem with a key joint to be solved.

Still, a successful spacewalk has now repaired the motor that keeps one set of panels pointing towards the sun (press release). The repair team had to work in darkness as they were working with live cables on the panels. Sunlight could have generated power that would electrocute them.

The cause of the joint problem is still not clear. "We did not see any smoking guns as a result of our inspections today, It’s going to take a detailed analysis of all the data we have, including a metallurgical and chemical analysis of the samples we have taken, to really put the pieces of the puzzle together,” says flight director Kwatsi Alibaruho (Houston Chronicle).

Until enough power can be generated by the panels a Japanese lab scheduled for installation is in mothballs.

After the motor was installed astronaut Dan Tani apparently said, “Hey. It works!”

It’s nice to hear those words being used in reference to the ISS solar panels again...

Power problems for space station - October 29, 2007
More space station woes - October 31, 2007
Space station solar panels: one fixed, one to go - November 05, 2007
Someone’s got it in for the ISS - December 14, 2007

Image: astronaut prepares to inspect joint / NASA TV

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A quick update on the Pope. After his recent pronouncement about the dangers of being seduced by science he’s now warning that human dignity has been “shattered” by the prospect of cloning (Reuters).

This is strangely reminiscent of a recent statement from a group of Catholic bishops in the UK that has stirred up much ire amongst scientists.

In a speech to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which used to be called the inquisition, the Pope said freezing embryos, embryonic stem cell research, and the prospect of human cloning had “shattered the barriers meant to protect human dignity”, according to Reuters.

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Bats in the United States are dying from a mysterious disease at such a rate that they face extinction.

“What we’ve seen so far is unprecedented. Most bat researchers would agree that this is the gravest threat to bats they have ever seen,” says Alan Hicks, leader of a New York Department of Environmental Conservation investigation into the problem (press release).

In some caves more than 90% of resident bats have succumbed to ‘white nose syndrome’, named after the fungus that covers the noses of some victims. Bats suffering from the problem seem to have run through their fat reserves months before they should be emerging from hibernation, says the DEC.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this is that the syndrome has now reached the abandoned mine where half of New York’s endangered Indiana bats hibernate. “There are an awful lot of bat people, even a month ago before we had half of this bad news, all saying the same thing. We’ve never seen anything like it, and we’re all scared,” Hicks told Bloomberg.

Some are already drawing parallels with the colony collapse disorder that is devastating US bees.

There’s a great piece on this in Schenectady’s Daily Gazette.

Image: DEC

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The latest set of photos beamed back by NASA’s Messenger probe have revealed more interesting features from Mercury. Earlier this month photos from Messenger showed huge cliffs, now the mission has found a strange ‘spider’ feature and been forced to increase estimates of the size of a massive basin on the planet.

“This flyby allowed us to see a part of the planet never before viewed by spacecraft, and our little craft has returned a gold mine of exciting data. From the perspectives of spacecraft performance and manoeuvre accuracy, this encounter was near-perfect, and we are delighted that all of the science data are now on the ground,” says Sean Solomon, principal investigator for the mission (press release).

The Spider

This feature – of a type not seen before on Mercury or on the Moon – consists of over a hundred narrow trenches radiating out from a central point. An impact crater in the middle may explain this feature, which NASA says resulted from the breaking apart of materials that filled the Caloris Basin (where the feature resides) after its formation.

But it may not. “The Spider has a crater near its centre, but whether that crater is related to the original formation or came later is not clear at this time,” says James Head, science team co-investigator at Brown University, Providence. Infuriatingly there are no other explanations at this time.

Caloris Basin

As well as being home to the Spider the basin itself has surprised scientists. Data from the last Mercury mission in 1975 led to the belief that the basin was around 1,300 kilometres across. Now it looks like this estimate will be revised upwards by up to 250 km.

“Understanding the formation of this giant basin will provide insight into the early history of major impacts in the inner Solar System, with implications not just for Mercury, but for all the planets, including Earth,” says Robert Strom, of the University of Arizona.

More
Photo and presentation details from the NASA team

Images: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington/Brown University

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The stress of watching football matches can bring on a heart attack, according to researchers in Germany. On days when the national team played in the 2006 world cup there were 2.66 times more cardiac emergencies in Munich.

“Viewing a stressful soccer match more than doubles the risk of an acute cardiovascular event. In view of this excess risk, particularly in men with known coronary heart disease, preventive measures are urgently needed,” say Ute Wilbert-Lampen and colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Thankfully for sports fans ‘preventive measures’ don’t seem to include banning unhealthy people from watching sport. Instead Wilbert-Lampen wants consideration given to dishing out beta-blockers, aspirin and other drugs to fans with pre-existing heart problems and maybe giving “behaviour therapy for coping with stress”.

Continue reading "Watching football can kill you" »

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An increasing number of tourists is generally thought to be the greatest threat to the Galapagos ecosystem. But they are unlikely culprits in the latest problem: a person or persons unknown has massacred 53 sea lions for no obvious reason.

The animals’ bodies were found within a kilometre of each other on the island of Pinta, according to AFP. “The sea lions, including 13 pups, died because of a strong blow from someone. It was a massacre whose motives the prosecutor’s office must clarify,” says Victor Carrion, an official with the Galapagos National Park.

The BBC points out that the animals are a vital part of the Galapagos food chain. Although they are sometimes hunted for their skin or for use in Chinese medicine the bodies were intact, ruling this out as a motive.

Conservation on the islands has increasingly taken second place to tourism in recent years and there have been high profile conflicts with fishermen, notably in 2000 and 2004. This new development represents a further blow to their ecosystem.

Image: Galapagos sea lions / NOAA

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A pair of students has traced the distinctive mating sound of a California hummingbird to its tail feathers. Although the birds who lost their tails for the research won’t appreciate it, their sacrifice has ended a long running debate.

Some have argued that the chirping sounds made by the Anna’s hummingbird are vocal. However Christopher Clark and Teresa Feo of UC Berkeley used a nifty 500-shots-per-second camera to record the birds during display dives in mating season and found the chirp coincided with a 60 millisecond spreading of birds’ tail feathers (research abstract in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, news coverage in Telegraph, AFP, Independent).

To check it was definitely their plumage causing the sound, the pair pulled the tail feathers off several birds - the press release assures us they grow back - and trimmed the feathers of others. Birds they interfered with were unable to chirp. They then took some of the feathers they’d removed to a wind tunnel and found a wind speed equivalent to the birds’ diving caused the feather to flutter at a frequency equivalent to the highest note on a piano (C four octaves above middle C).

“This is a new mechanism for sound production in birds. The Anna's hummingbird is the only hummingbird for which we know all the details, but there are a number of other species with similarly shaped tail feathers that may use their tail morphology in producing sounds,” says Clark.

More
Listen to the chirp
Video of Anna’s hummingbird diving

Image: display dive compiled from high speed video / Christopher J. Clark and Teresa Feo/UC Berkeley

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It’s always nice to see science becoming art, especially when it’s done as nicely as this. Jenn Schmitt has got 96 different printmakers to come up with their own visual interpretations of various elements and put them together into a periodic table (hat tip: Good Morning Silicon Valley). They’ve even tackled the elements for which no obvious picture suggests itself.

You can view the full table in its glory on the Periodic Table Printmaking Project website.

Individual element pictures range from charming and literal (a balloon and the Sun for Helium) to rather more abstract (a rooster for Gallium). It’s also nice to see that artists can also be geeks – the picture for Nickel is a graph of the value of the amount of Nickel in a nickel over six months of 2007.

Images above: hydrogen and helium.

“Knowing how the world around you works makes life so much richer. So the connection of art and science is an important one to me,” Schmitt says in an interview.

Other periodic tables we like
It’s a table, and a periodic table
Comic book periodic table
BBC’s ‘Look Around You’ spoof
Chemsoc’s Visual Elements table
CSRRI’s x-ray properties table

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Politicians in America are demanding to know why a government agency apparently tried to suppress scientific evidence about health risks following Hurricane Katrina.

The allegations centre on trailers erected as temporary accommodation for those whose homes were destroyed when Katrina devastated New Orleans. Many trailers have been found to have levels of formaldehyde far higher than permitted.

Now it seems the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which took charge after the hurricane, attempted to control the outcome of a report on the issue from the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

“The evidence that FEMA ignored, hid and manipulated government research on the potential impact of long-term exposure to formaldehyde on Katrina victims now living in travel trailers is hard to ignore. Honest scientific studies don’t start with the conclusion, and then work backwards from there,” says Brad Miller, the chair of the House of Representatives subcommittee investigating the issue (press release).

According to a press release from Miller’s subcommittee, FEMA attempted prevent consideration of long-term exposure in the report. This would be a bizarre move given those living in the trailers would obviously be subjected to long term exposure. Some people are still living in them now, more than two years after Katrina.

FEMA has denied the charges. “Any and all allegations that FEMA ignored or manipulated formaldehyde-related research are unfounded and false,” CNN quotes Carlos Castillo as saying.

CBS points out that if this is all true it means the Centers for Disease Control, which runs ATSDR, has been compromised. As CDC is, in its words, “one of the nation’s most respected agencies” the fallout could be considerable.

Bart Gordon, chair of the House Committee on Science and Technology, warned, “Our Committee has been looking closely at ATSDR for some time and we believe the report on formaldehyde in FEMA trailers may be just the tip of the iceberg. As Chairman, I assure you this will continue garnering the Committee's attention for some time to come.”

This is far from the first time concerns have been raised over the trailers. US politician Henry Waxman has been banging on about it for quite some time.

Image: Katrina approaching Florida / NASA Visible Earth

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Given its devastating impact on Europe some people have assumed that the Black Death was so virulent that it killed without regards to victims’ health. By looking at hundreds of skeletons, researchers with a taste for the macabre have disproved this supposition.

“A lot of people have assumed that the Black Death killed indiscriminately, just because it had such massive mortality,” Sharon DeWitte, a paleo-pathologist at University at Albany in New York, told Reuters.

For a new paper in PNAS, DeWitte and her colleagues analysed 490 skeletons from victims of the 1349 London outbreak of plague, called Black Death as it caused unsightly black patches on the skin. They looked for lesions on bones (which can be caused by malnutrition) in these remains and also in a control sample of bones from non-epidemic cemeteries from Denmark.

Continue reading "A plague on the weak" »

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George W. Bush gave his last State of the Union address as president last night, and already the pundits are dissecting what it means for science, technology and health issues.

The answer, of course, is relatively little, since Bush is on his last 12 months in the job. But his address is still significant in that it sets the tone for what Bush will continue to work for as he winds down his presidency. After all, he remains the leader of the most powerful country in the world, even if no one in Washington is paying attention to anyone who’s not named Obama, McCain, Romney, Giuliani or Clinton.

The old joke is that expectations are set low on purpose for the speech, and that Bush met them. The folks over at Science Progress have a pre-speech look at how science and technology played in prior State of the Union addresses. The short answer: energy and innovation are big, stem cells and carbon emissions are not. Last night Bush remedied that, if only to mention embryonic stem cells in the context of the human skin reprogramming work last fall that conservatives have seized on as a reason not to fund embryonic stem-cell work.

Energy popped up in its usual framework as well, with Bush praising Congress – well, at least acknowledging it – for passing a massive energy bill late last year. This time, he renewed calls for his usual technology-oriented solutions to climate change: coal-fired power plants that sequester carbon, an expansion of nuclear power, plus a little twist in the shape of a $2-billion international clean technology fund to “help developing nations like India and China make greater use of clean energy sources”. Not a word, as climate advocates point out, about mandatory emissions caps for the US.

Bush also called on Congress to restore funding for the American Competitiveness Initiative, a doubling of research in the physical sciences proposed in his 2006 address that got derailed late last year in last-minute budget negotiations. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has told the research community that she is still committed to these sorts of budget increases, but it remains to be seen what will happen in the next round of budget negotiations.

Finally, Bush called for a doubling of funding to fight AIDS in Africa. The $15-billion PEPFAR program would bump up to $30 billion over the next five years, if Congress approves the spending. Which may, in the end, be the most positive news for science Bush leaves behind – except, of course, that a third of PEPFAR monies must go to programs that promote abstinence, an approach public health advocates generally decry.

Image: Bush delivering State of the Union Address / White House photo

Posted by Alex Witze
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Clearly the Pope enjoyed the last time he got a bunch of scientists riled (Great Beyond post from earlier this month). His latest pronouncement seems sure to do it again.

This time the Pope seems to have waded into my favourite topic in the philosophy of science – reductionism. “Man is not the fruit of chance or a bundle of convergences, determinisms or physical and chemical reactions,” he boldly declared to scientists at a Paris meeting (Canada’s National Post).

He might have got away with this if he hadn’t gone further, saying “In an age when scientific developments attract and seduce with the possibilities they offer, it’s more important than ever to educate our contemporaries’ consciences so that science does not become the criteria for goodness.”

Now I’ve never thought science was in danger of becoming ‘the criteria for goodness’, but leaving that aside nothing in this latest speech is necessarily more controversial than previous Pope pronouncements (which generally reiterate the old “science can’t know everything” argument). As both the National Post and Reuters point out though, coming so soon after his last conflict this is sure to reignite debate between the pontiff and scientists.

Obviously I’m biased though, having long ago been ‘attracted and seduced’ by the possibilities offered by scientific developments. Is that so wrong?

More
The editor of New Humanist looks at the last row
The Lancet examines ‘the Pope’s mixed record on science’ (subscription required)

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Maximum respect to the clever people at Wired who have decoded the secret messages in Craig Venter’s new synthetic chromosome. Released last week, the genome contained “watermark” sequences to differentiate it from the genomes of natural examples of Mycoplasm genitalium to prove it was truly synthetic.

It’s hard to write a catchy message using just the four letters found in DNA; but every DNA sequence can be translated into a lists of amino acids (give or take the odd stop codon), and each amino acid has a one letter symbol. 20 amino acids thus allow you to write pretty much anything you might want to, if you’re willing to use some creative spelling.

Here’s Wired’s reading of the watermarks

VENTERINSTITVTE
CRAIGVENTER
HAMSMITH
CINDIANDCLYDE
GLASSANDCLYDE

Authors on the paper in Science included Venter, Hamilton Smith, John Glass, Clyde Hutchison and Cindi Pfannkoch.

Wired thinks it is disappointing, although perhaps not unexpected, that the team went for personal glory over something more profound. But signing your work is hardly an ignoble act. What do you want: “The eagle has landed”? “We come in peace for all mankind”? “One small step for a Ham”? I’m just grateful they didn’t insert the number of their patent application in roman numerals...

My boss points out that Wired has a track record in messages encoded in gene sequences.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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According to a group of geologists we humans have changed the Earth so much we should stop calling this geological age the Holocene epoch. Instead they want us to call it the anthropocene (press release).

In Nature in 2002 Paul Crutzen wrote an article stating, “It seems appropriate to assign the term 'Anthropocene' to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene — the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia. The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with James Watt's design of the steam engine in 1784.”

Then in 2003 Nature ran an editorial headlined, “Welcome to the Anthropocene” (subscription required) and we revisited the topic again in 2004.

Now researchers have decided to really push for the adoption of the new title.

Continue reading "In this day and age..." »

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Today’s claim to be filed in the ‘WHAT!’ section is that wearing a cycle helmet with some lamps in it for ten minutes a day can cure dementia.

OK it is a bit more complicated than that; but at root this is what scientists from the University of Sunderland in the UK are saying. Before we go any further we should point out that this hasn’t been tested in humans, there doesn’t seem to be any peer-reviewed research on it in humans, and there is a commercial company behind this which markets similar products to cure cold sores and wrinkles.

A press release from the university says that research has shown that regular exposure to low level infra-red light can improve learning performance and “kick-start the cognitive function of the brain”.

Continue reading "Can shining lights on your head cure dementia?" »

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There’s an interesting article in The Guardian today about how travellers to Mars could be protected against the solar wind that would otherwise smash into their DNA with nasty consequences. This article follows up on a whole series from other sources last year, and details a neat step towards creating a shield for space travellers.

Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England found that a magnet placed into a beam of high-energy particles designed to mimic solar wind deflected the wind around it. This isn’t necessarily hugely surprising but it does mean that the research team can claim their method is a viable way of shielding spaceships going to Mars from the solar wind.

“We now have actual measurements that show a ‘hole’ in the solar wind could be created in which a spacecraft could sit, affording some protection from ‘ion storms’, as they would call them on Star Trek,” Bamford says in the Guardian.

This work first got wide publicity last year, when New Scientist ran a piece on it although at that time it was up in the air whether it would work. In that article Frank Cucinotta, NASA's chief radiation health officer, also said this approach could have drawbacks compared to simply adding layers of material to block particles. Chief amongst these if that if the system breaks you have no shield at all.

Bamford’s work also appeared on a number of blog posts, and if you can get the Rutherford lab’s latest podcast to work you can listen to her on there too.

Image: artist's concept of future crew exploration vehicle / NASA/John Frassanito and Associates

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Tonight may be your best chance to see asteroid TU24, a giant rock that is definitely not going to smash into Earth.

Despite claims from some sections of the internet that we could all be obliterated by the 250 metre diameter monster, TU24 will actually sail safely past Earth, some 538,000 kilometres away at about half past midnight. You will need a telescope to see it though, at that distant the rock will be 50 times fainter than it would need to be to be visible (NASA press release).

These really rather rubbish images have been released by NASA, with each pixel representing about 20 metres. Next week we’re promised higher resolution snaps.

The Bad Astronomy blogger recently got quite incensed about a video claiming TU24 would hit us. Today he has fired back with his own video, saying, “I am fed up. For those who haven’t been following this saga, some doomsayers have been claiming that an asteroid named 2007 TU24 poses a grave threat to Earth. These fearmongers are completely wrong, scaring lots of others, and are apparently unwilling to listen to reason.”

This is however going to be the closest an asteroid of this size gets to Earth until 2027, says Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office (in Reuters, The Times, Fox, and others). Doomsayers can take heart though, the caveat “known” should be added in front of the word asteroid. There could still be a rock we haven’t seen yet on a course to make us the next dinosaurs...

UPDATE
If you feel the need for another video you can watch scientists at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office discussing the rock.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Scientists went toe to toe with the Catholic Church last week over legislation on embryo research that is currently making its way through the UK’s parliament.

A statement from the assembly of Catholic bishops in England and Wales read out in catholic churches claimed the legislation would, “allow scientists to create embryos that are half human, half animal. For example from the egg of a woman and sperm from an animal. To do this would be a radical violation of human dignity.” A number of scientists came out to denounce this as downright false.

“The Catholic Bishops’ statement on hybrids is not a radical violation of human dignity as they claim - it is a radical violation of the truth! The cloning technique removes all the animal DNA in the nucleus of an unfertilized egg and replaces it with an adult human cell that can then be reprogrammed to generate embryonic stem cells. It is a sperm free process,” says Chris Shaw, a professor of neurology and neurogenetics at King’s College London (via the Science Media Centre, no online press release).

Continue reading "‘A radical violation of the truth’" »

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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

Continue reading "Weekly round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Recently the Great Beyond featured a whole post of science related songs. Now another one has popped into my inbox.

Although this isn’t a new song and it’s about maths rather than science, today is a Friday. This seems reason enough to give a post over to the genius that is The Klein Four Group’s ‘Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)’

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Brazil is preparing to call on the army in a bid to stop Amazon deforestation. New figures show deforestation increased markedly in the last five months, which is surprising as last year the government said deforestation was slowing.

As well as using the army to carry out inspections, new initiatives include a moratorium on any new deforestation requests, holding businesses that buy commodities from destroyed areas responsible for deforestation, and making landowners prove they maintain preservation areas (Reuters).

There are two sets of figures floating around for the last five months of last year. The first set, derived from the DETER satellite system, say 3,200 square kilometres were felled (Reuters uses these). A second set are estimates of the true damage that will be unveiled when better images become available and these put the damage at 7,000 sq km (AFP and the Guardian use these).

The raw numbers are available from Brazil’s national space research institute. Perhaps the most troubling thing is the massive increase in the rate of loss: 243 sq km disappeared in August but this was up to 948 sq km in December (press release, in Portuguese). Dalton de Morrison Valeriano, the institute’s Amazon programme coordinator, says that the system used for these numbers usually comes out between 40 and 60% below the system that makes detailed annual calculations. He puts the variation on the 7,000 sq km figure at 1,400 sq km.

Continue reading "Army sent in to save rainforest" »

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Comet samples returned to Earth by a NASA mission are forcing scientists to revise their ideas about the comet they sent it to.

Comets are thought to form out in the suburbs of the solar system, and researchers expected the Stardust mission to Wild 2 to return with samples of the “pre-solar” dust that would have been found out there. Hence the name.

Boy were they wrong – Wild 2 has a composition more like that of an asteroid and the researchers found material characteristic of the inner solar system, according to research published in Science.

“The material is a lot less primitive and more altered than materials we have gathered through high altitude capture in our own stratosphere from a variety of comets,” says study author Hope Ishii (press release). “...It’s a reminder that we can’t make black and white distinctions between asteroids and comets. There is a continuum between them.”

Continue reading "No stardust for comet mission" »

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The long running saga of NASA’s “drunken astronauts” may finally be wrapped up. On the off chance you’re not bored by this epic, the latest report found a “single isolated incident of perceived impairment of a crew member which occurred in the final days before launch, but not on launch day or within 12 hours of a launch or aviation event”.

This follows on from the last report in August last year which was “unable to verify any case in which an astronaut spaceflight crewmember was impaired on launch day”. That report came after another in July which stated “two specific instances were described where astronauts had been so intoxicated prior to flight that flight surgeons and/or fellow astronauts raised concerns to local on-scene leadership regarding flight safety”.

So first there were two, then were none, now there is one.

The report is actually part of a wider inquiry into astronaut health, as the Orlando Sentinel does a nice job of explaining.

Other news coverage: CNN; NY Times; Space.com.

Image: Punchstock

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Claims of huge importance for a newly discovered human skull have been undermined by some experts.

There has been a fair bit of excitement in China on the state news service about the 100,000 year old skull found in Henan and the excitement was catching for Reuters and the Guardian. Shan Jixiang, director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, told China Daily, “It is the greatest discovery in China after the Peking Man and Upper Cave Man skull fossils were found in Beijing early last century, and will shed light on a critical period of human evolution.”

Dennis Etler, a palaeoanthropologist at Cabrillo College, California, told the Guardian, “This is a crucial period in human evolutionary history, but we know almost nothing about it. Anything coming from that period is of great interest to the outside world. This sounds like a breakthrough.”

The South China Morning Post even reckons this find “may bury ‘Out of Africa’ theory” (subscription required).

This conclusion isn’t backed up by other experts. Wu Xinzhi, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told AFP, “It is far from the greatest judging from points such as the completeness, the time, and the significance of problems it can explain. So far, it just can prove that there were human beings living in Henan about 80,000 to 100,000 years ago and the shape of their heads was roughly what the skull shows.”

And in his brief blog note on the topic, biological anthropologist Greg Laden says it is “interesting, but not necessarily earth-shattering”.

We’ll come back to this when a peer review publication surfaces...

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Yellowstone Park has supplemented its popular still-shot Geyser Webcams with a live video feed of Old Faithful, one of the two most famous geysers in the world (the other being in Iceland). This promises not only Old Faithful but will also point at other geysers, including Beehive, Lion, and Giantess, when these are erupting.

“When bison, elk, coyotes, or the occasional bear wander into the camera’s view, live video images will be transmitted,” adds the park website.

Old Faithful is so named due to its regularity. Maybe this new webcam will reveal whether park rangers are putting soap powder into it – a common trick to make geysers erupt...

Other Yellowstone webcams are available here. For those of you who don’t want to wait, a video is embedded for your viewing pleasure.

Hat tip: Reuters

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