The Dish

Alex Knapp summarizes the news:

NASA has announced that its Kepler telescope has uncovered a new solar system about 500 light years away, currently dubbed Kepler 186. Circling that star are five planets, and the outermost planet, Kepler-186f, is about the size of Earth and within the star’s habitable zone. “The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth,” NASA’s Paul Hertz said in a statement. The star Kepler 186 is a “red dwarf” star, about half the size and mass of our own Sun. It’s about 500 light years away from Earth, near the constellation Cygnus in the night sky. The planet itself orbits its sun once every 130 days.

Adrienne LaFrance provides more details:

Kepler-186f is about 10 percent larger than Earth and it orbits a sun that is cooler, dimmer, and about half the size of our own. The effects of gravity would be “slightly” more apparent there, so “you would feel heavier,” Meadows said. Our cousin avoids many of the problems that reduce the likelihood of life on other Earth-like planets. Some are too big, too cold, too gaseous, or have gravity problems that scorch oceans. So far, Kepler-186f appears almost to be a Goldilocks — not too big, not too far from its star, maybe just right.

Phil Plait calls this “potentially the most Earth-like planet we’ve yet found”

Joseph Stromberg explains what comes next:

This is more of a stepping stone in the search for earth-like planets and extraterrestrial life than a destination. Because the star is so far away, we can’t really tell if it has an atmosphere or learn much more about it, and definitely can’t visit it.

So astronomers like Barclay and the hundreds of others looking for exoplanets will use this as evidence that earth-sized planets can form in their star’s habitable zones, and search for others closer to us. The discovery is particularly exciting because the majority of stars in our galaxy are red dwarves like Kepler-186, so there may be many more exoplanets similar to this one out there.

(Image: Artist’s concept depicts Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone. By NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech.)

A group of Democratic lawmakers led by Dick Durbin has issued a report showing that, in the absence of regulations like those imposed on tobacco products, e-cigarettes are being openly marketed to young people:

The Gateway to Addiction report written by the lawmakers’ staff after surveying e-cig makers finds e-cigarette companies are using marketing tactics that appeal to young people, such as handing out samples at events like music festivals, social-media promotion and offering kid-friendly flavors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate 1.78 million children and teens tried e-cigarettes in 2012. … According to the report, six of the surveyed e-cigarette companies support some regulation.

The report is the opening volley in a campaign to regulate vaping. Jason Koebler expects Congress to act soon:

The FDA, for its part, has moved slowly on the issue. Three years ago, the agency said they were considering regulating e-cigs, but they haven’t done so yet, electing only to regulate the ones specifically marketed for therapeutic purposes (that is, those that are specifically marketed to help you quit smoking). Instead, the agency says it “intents to issue a proposed rule extending FDA’s tobacco product authorities beyond [cigarettes] to include other products like e-cigarettes.”

And German Lopez voxplains how little we know about how bad e-cigs are for you:

One of the major risks of e-cigarettes right now is that we simply don’t have a lot of good information about their health effects. One study from an international group of scientists found e-cigarettes are safer than conventional cigarettes but still toxic. Researchers estimated conventional cigarette smoke contained 9-450 times more toxins than e-cigarette vapor. They also advised more research into the issue.

Another ongoing study indicates e-cigarettes could cause genetic mutations that can lead to cancer. Researchers from UCLA, Boston University, and the University of Texas so far found that certain cells exposed to e-cigarette vapor showed similar genetic changes as cells exposed to conventional cigarette smoke. The changes weren’t identical, but researchers said there were striking similarities — enough to raise concerns that e-cigarettes could, at some level, lead to lung cancer.

Konnikova relays the research:

Boredom, hunger, fatigue: these are all states in which we may find our attention drifting and our focus becoming more and more difficult to maintain. A yawn, then, may serve as a signal for our bodies to perk up, a way of making sure we stay alert. When the psychologist Ronald Baenninger, a professor emeritus at Temple University, tested this theory in a series of laboratory studies coupled with naturalistic observation (he had subjects wear wristbands that monitored physiology and yawning frequency for two weeks straight), he found that yawning is more frequent when stimulation is lacking. In fact, a yawn is usually followed by increased movement and physiological activity, which suggests that some sort of “waking up” has taken place.

“You yawn when you’re obviously not bored,” [Robert Provine, neuroscientist and author of Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond] points out.

“Olympic athletes sometimes yawn before their events; concert violinists may yawn before playing a concerto.” Provine once had a lab member who had been part of the Army Special Forces. As part of his research, he decided to look at soldiers who were preparing to jump from an airplane for the first time. The incidence of yawning went up just before they made their way to the cabin door. A yawn, Provine believes, may simply signal a change of physiological state: a way to help our mind and body transition from one behavioral state to another—“sleep to wakefulness, wakefulness to sleep, anxiety to calm, boredom to alertness.”

So, rather than condemn poor Sasha [who yawned during her father’s 2013 Inaugural Address], we may be better off praising her: in yawning, her body may have been making an effort to reëngage itself rather than succumb to fatigue or hunger.

(Photo by Sander van der Wel)

It may be the age at which our cognitive performance peaks:

That’s the conclusion of a new study in PLoS One published last week by psychology researcher Joseph Thompson and his colleagues at Canada’s Simon Fraser University. The team tracked and measured the performance of 3,305 subjects (between the ages of 16 and 44) who played the nerdy “real-time strategy” computer game StarCraft 2. “Using a piecewise regression analysis, we find that age-related slowing of within-game, self-initiated response times begins at 24 years of age,” the authors write. In other words, older players took longer to respond to new visual playing conditions before taking action. And, according to the study, it was “a significant performance deficit,” which likely has consequences even outside abstruse digital space wars.

The paper does not focus on biological causes, but the authors speculate that the shift might have to do with changing brain “ratios of N-acetylaspartate (NAA) to choline (Cho)” that coincide with the early twenties.

Christopher Ingraham explains why measuring brain power with a computer game isn’t as silly as it sounds:

The game provides an excellent real-world laboratory for testing cognitive ability under pressure.

It’s already used in a University of Florida Honors class to teach “critical thinking, problem solving, resource management, and adaptive decision making.” In studying game replays, the researchers at Simon Fraser found that “looking-doing latency” – the delay between when a player looked at a new section of the game field, and when they performed an in-game action – is lowest among 24-year-old players. After age 24, that lag only increases as you get older. The researchers calculate that over an average 15-minute game of Starcraft, a 39-year-old player loses 30 seconds to cognitive lag versus a 24-year-old. In a game where performance is measured in hundreds of actions per minute, this is a huge deficit.

Derek Thompson spotlights the stagnation of retail jobs:

According to data obtained by The Atlantic from EMSI, the retail industry gained about 49,000 jobs between 2001 and 2013, which means it grew by exactly 0.32 percent. Which means it didn’t grow. But the major action is at the bookends of this graph below, which shows employment growth in the largest retail subcategories. Department stores, like JCPenney, lost more than 200,000 jobs this century. But supercenters like Walmart, which operates in more than 3,200 domestic locations, added half a million (often lower-paying) jobs.

Relatedly, Edward McClelland reflects on the decline of Sears:

Sears is dying as a result of two not unrelated phenomena: the shrinking of the middle class and the atomization of American culture.

It’s still an all-things-for-all-shoppers emporium that sells pool tables, gas grills, televisions, beds and power drills, then cleans your teeth, checks your eyes and fills out your taxes. But that niche is disappearing as customers hunt for bargains on the Internet and in specialty stores, and as the retail world is pulled apart into avant-garde department stores and discounters — exactly what Sears promised it would never be. Maybe in 1975, a salesman and his boss both bought their shirts and ties at Sears, but now the boss shops at Barneys, and the salesman goes to Men’s Wearhouse. This divide is a result of the fact that, over the last two decades, the top 5 percent of earners have increased their share of consumption from 28 percent to 38 percent.

“As a retailer or a restaurant chain, if you’re not at the really high level or the low level, that’s a tough place to be,” John G. Maxwell, head of the global retail and consumer practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers told The New York Times in February. “You don’t want to be stuck in the middle.”

Dreher contributes his thoughts:

I don’t think I know anybody who shops at Sears. As McClelland points out, most people today either shop at discount stores like Walmart, or at more specialized retailers. I don’t know about you, but I almost never go to department stores, even the more upscale ones, like Nordstroms. When I do, it feels nostalgic, but not in a pleasant way. It’s like riding around in a 1980s-model Lincoln Continental, but not one old-school enough to be cool. It’s not so much the merchandise as it is the form.