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The NASA team assembling Curiosity back in 2011. Photo: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Floats, marching bands and President Obama won’t be the only things on display at Monday’s Inauguration Parade. NASA will be participating, too, and they’re bringing along the Curiosity team. Although the rover itself could not take time off from Mars to make the parade, a full-size model will stand in instead. Orion, the capsule that NASA plans will take astronauts farther into space than ever before, will also be on display in model form.

Members of the Curiosity team will greet parade-goers on the sidelines, and the NASA Headquarters is also opening its doors to spectators looking to warm up from the cold or check out the facility throughout the day on Monday.

Other parade highlights include a Hawaii float in honor of Obama’s birthplace, which will feature a large volcano modeled after the Diamond Head Volcano, and a Martin Luther King, Jr., float, which creates a visual representation of his quote, “out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

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Photo: SanguineSeas

Christmas trees can be recycled to build sand dunes, create fish habitat or be ground up as trail and garden mulch. Now, however, researchers have come up with a new way to put retired holiday firs to use: as sterilization materials for medical equipment on the nano-scale.

Needles from Pseudotsuga menziesii, or the Douglas fir, contain an extract that acts as a natural chemical-reducing agent and converts silver ions, which are commonly used as antimicrobials, to nanoscopic silver particles. In other words, the Christmas tree needles help make the silver particles really, really small.

The medical community still struggles to ensure that biomedical devices, prosthetics and sensors are fully sterilized before use. Despite all we know about sterilization and microbes, pathogens can still sneak onto equipment and cause problems for patients that come into contact with it. The tiny silver particles can be used to safely coat medical implants and surgical devices in order to prevent microbes from colonizing the surface.

The team, based in India, succeeded in generating those particles and coating metals and other material in the sterilizing solution. Though this is only a proof of concept, someday those pesky fallen needles may help save lives—or at least sterilize needles for annual flu shots.

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Image: Annie Mole

There are some things that are universal—trade, money, shelter, hangovers. And there are cures for hangovers from all over the world. National Geographic reports:

Suggestions range from greasy breakfasts to vanilla milkshakes to spending time in a steamy sauna. A friend insists hot peppers are the only way to combat a hangover’s wrath. Another swears by the palliative effects of a bloody mary. In fact, many people just have another drink, following the old “hair of the dog that bit you” strategy.

They’ve put together a graphic that shows how to cure that pounding headache no matter where you are. In Germany, you eat pickled herring. In China, you drink strong green tea. In Poland, relief comes in a sour pickle, and in Mexico, it travels by way of shrimp. Hungover in Romania? Try some tripe soup. In the Netherlands, you just drink more beer.

But doctors don’t necessarily agree. Here’s National Geographic again:

Doctors typically recommend water for hydration and ibuprofen to reduce inflammation. Taking B vitamins is also good, according to anesthesiologist Jason Burke, because they help the body metabolize alcohol and produce energy.

Burke should know a thing or two about veisalgia, the medical term for hangover. At his Las Vegas clinic Hangover Heaven, Burke treats thousands of people suffering from the effects of drinking to excess with hydrating fluids and medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“No two hangovers are the same,” he said, adding that the unfavorable condition costs society billions of dollars-mostly from lost productivity and people taking sick days from work.

And really, as we all unfortunately know, only time will soothe the hangover beast, no matter where you are.

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We’ve Been Celebrating With Booze for 10,000 Years

Photo: chrischapman

The worst of the New Year’s hangovers are behind us, but take solace knowing that people have been celebrating— and paying for it the day after—with booze for 10,000 years now. This ancient social lubricant has been a staple of cultic feasts and gatherings since the dawn of time, archaeological evidence suggests, meaning every time we sip a cold stout or toast with a glass of bubbly, we’re taking part in a millennia-old tradition.

Archaeologists, for example, recently found evidence of nearly 11,000 year-old beer brewing troughs at a cultic feasting site in Turkey, Discovery News reports.

Some researchers suggest that beer arose 11,500 years ago and drove the cultivation of grains. Because grains require so much hard work to produce (collecting tiny, mostly inedible parts, separating grain from chaff, and grinding into flour), beer brewing would have been reserved for feasts with important cultural purposes.

Those feasts — and alcohol-induced friendliness — may have enabled hunter-gatherers to bond with larger groups of people in newly emerging villages, fueling the rise of civilization. At work parties, beer may have motivated people to put a little elbow grease into bigger-scale projects such as building ancient monuments.

In other words, beer and other booze likely helped advance cultures and build monuments, in addition to giving citizens of the time a reason to celebrate. ”There must have been a real sense of anticipation within the community when you knew a big beer event was coming up,” the archaeologists told Discovery.

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As part of Google’s ongoing Zeitgeist project, the company is mapping New Year’s resolutions from people around the world. If you’re feeling particularly open about your goals, you can even chart your own. A built-in translator lets you know that people in Japan, too, want to be more productive at work. Someone in Brazil wants to find love, someone in Poland wants to spend more time with their family, and a person in the Netherlands really wants to travel more.

New Years resolutions from all around the world. photo: Google

But, says Hannah Waters for her blog Culturing Science, if you want to actually keep your resolution, you might want to keep it to yourself.

The act of announcing what you aim to do to friends and family–and hearing their approval–provides similar satisfaction to achieving the goal, giving you a “premature sense of completeness,” as noted in a 2009 study (PDF). And with your self-satisfaction meter already half-full before you start, the motivation to work hard is sapped. Essentially, proclaiming your goals at a New Year’s party can undermine your own efforts from the get-go.

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