Including: Star Trek IV‘s Transparent Aluminum, Transformers Camaros, Scary-Music Psychology, Disaster-Movie Comets and MORE.

Scary Music Scarier with Eyes Closed
If you’re the kind of person who covers your eyes at the scariest parts of movies, you’re only making it worse for yourself, according to scientists.

“New research suggests the brain regards creepy music as even more frightening when eyes are closed rather than open, scientists now reveal,” LiveScience reported this week. Neuroscientists have discovered that the amygdala — the part of the brain that senses emotion and fear — “kicks into action” when people listen to scary music with their eyes shut, according to New Scientist.

In a study held at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel, the scientists monitored volunteers who listened to pieces of music both with and without the benefit of visual stimulus. While more neutral music produced the same responses from those with eyes opened and closed, more unsettling music produced more neurotransmitter noradrenalin in subjects with closed eyes than open, as if responding to a threat, according to Talma Hendler, who ran the study, which is detailed online in the journal PLoS ONE.

Let’s test this theory ourselves. Hit play and close your eyes:

Scared?

Scotty Would Be Proud
Scientists claim to have created a form of aluminum that previously only existed in science fiction. In this week’s Nature Physics, an international research team led by Oxford University scientists report that they have created “transparent aluminum” by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser.

“Transparent aluminum” was featured in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, wherein Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott shares the chemical formula in exchange for acrylic glass.

The scientists report that a short pulse from Germany’s FLASH laser produced extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light — each one more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city — which “knocked out” a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminum nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation, according to Oxford University press materials (via PhysOrg.com).

“What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,” Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University Department of Physics, one of the paper’s authors, said.

Star Trek technical manuals indicate that transparent aluminum is used in various fittings in starships, including exterior ship portals and windows. The real scientists believe their finding will lead to further work relevant to planetary science and nuclear fusion.

Related: Real-Life Star Trek Devices and Mind-Boggling Materials

Karate-Chopping Web Viruses
Action superstar Jackie Chan has popped up in a new, bizarre ad for Russian Internet security provider Kaspersky Lab. In the ad (via Gizmodo), Chan hops on his Segway and rolls into the dangerous cyberworld to punch and roundhouse-kick virtual viruses.

Yeah, it’s pretty weird. As it happens, though, Chan actually has a stake in the two-wheeled, self-balancing electric vehicles invented by Dean Kamen. Chan is a co-partner in a dealership that sells them. Still not sure if this ad will sell any security systems…

This is the New GM
Last week, General Motors Co. officially announced the 2010 Chevy Camaro Transformers Special Edition. The standard Transformers Camaro is, of course, yellow with black stripes, thus letting anyone who can afford a Camaro the opportunity to drive the Bumblebee character from the absurd action movies.

There are no performance upgrades — “you’ll have to make do with the 304, 400 or 426 horsepower that comes standard,” AutoBlog.com says — but the 2010 Chevrolet Camaro Transformers Special Edition does include the following:

• Autobot insignia fender badges and wheel caps;
• An embroidered Autobot insignia on the center console;
• Gloss-black rally stripes with Transformers logos; and
• Transformers-logo doorsill plates.

The $995 appearance package can be applied to LT (V6) and SS-trim Camaros in Rally Yellow with or without the optional RS package.

“When the first TRANSFORMERS movie was setting box office records, we had countless customers asking to purchase the ‘BUMBLEBEE’ Camaro,” Karen Rafferty, product marketing director for Chevrolet, said in the press release. “Now, they can buy one with the new Camaro TRANSFORMERS Special Edition. Streets all over North America will be buzzing in no time.”

Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!
Betelgeuse, the second-brightest star in the constellation of Orion, is a red supergiant, one of the biggest stars known and almost 1,000 times larger than the sun. It also emits more light than 100,000 suns. One of the many unsolved mysteries of red supergiants is exactly how they shed such tremendous quantities of material — about the mass of the sun — in only 10,000 years.

Now, using different state-of-the-art techniques on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), two independent teams of astronomers have obtained the sharpest views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse ever photographed. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our solar system and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface.

Image of the supergiant star Betelgeuse obtained with ESO’s Very Large Telescope

The photographs provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate.

An artist’s impression showing the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it was revealed thanks to different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO’s VLT

Source: ESO

Disaster-Movie Comets Not Likely to Destroy Us
Despite what a number of disaster movies have made some people believe, crashing comets probably won’t cause the end of life as we know it, a study said yesterday.

New research from the University of Washington indicates it is highly unlikely that comets have caused any mass extinctions or have been responsible for more than one minor extinction event.

“For the past 25 years, the inner Oort Cloud has been considered a mysterious, unobserved region of the solar system capable of providing bursts of bodies that occasionally wipe out life on Earth,” according to study author Nathan Kaib.

Astronomers at the university used computer simulation to model the evolution of comet clouds in the solar system over the past 1.2 billion years. The simulation found the Earth has likely only sustained two or three significant hits from comets in the past 500 million years.

“With three major impacts taking place nearly simultaneously, it had been proposed that the minor extinction event about 40 million years ago resulted from a comet shower,” according to an announcement from the university. Kaib and co-author Thomas Quinn’s research implies that if that relatively minor extinction event was caused by a comet shower, then that was probably the most-intense comet shower since the fossil record began.

“That tells you that the most powerful comet showers caused minor extinctions and other showers should have been less severe, so comet showers are probably not likely causes of mass extinction events,” Kaid says.

The work was published yesterday in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

BONUS: Just Because
Here is a trailer for the 1954 Ghostbusters movie that never was, created from more than a dozen films and TV shows, recasting Dean Martin as Ray Stantz, Bob Hope as Peter Venkman and Fred MacMurray as Egon Spengler.

Source: whoiseyevan

Cheers.