Core Dump

Labels: science

The first-generation implants were successfully tested on six patients, but only held 16 electrodes (4-by-4-pixel array), which enabled the crude perception of lighted areas versus darkness after about 15 seconds. The second-generation implant upped the electrode array to 60 electrodes, which enabled 34 test patients to recognize doorways and windows as well as the edges that assist in navigation, such as walls and low-lying branches, after about 3 seconds.

The goal of the third generation of the implant will be to increase the electrode array to more than 200 electrodes, which will enable the near instantaneous recognition of text for reading, pictures and all the edge cues needed to navigate the world unaided. Ultimately, the artificial retinal will contain over 1,000 electrodes, which should restore instantaneous recognition of faces and other fine details that should fully integrate patients back into everyday society.

Labels: science, technical communication

This video also looks at whether other planets are also warming, and an Internet myth that NASA is now attributing warming to the sun. In this video I examine the importance of sources -- tracking information back to a source and making sure the source is credible. My sources are cited in the video, but I'll also post them here. Sources are also cited throughout my climate change series. These videos are not a personal opinion or a theory of my own; I'm not a climate scientist or a researcher and I have no qualifications to do anything other than report on what real climate scientists have discovered through their research. So there's no point in disagreeing with me. If you dislike their conclusions, take it up with the researchers I cite. If I've made a mistake in reporting their conclusions, please pooint out the mistake and I will happily correct it. If you think you know better than the experts, write a paper and have it published in a respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Labels: environment, science

Labels: science, video

The melting ice poses different threats. Barber said the ice is full of toxic contaminants, which are released back into the environment when the ice melts. Wildlife in the Arctic is negatively impacted by the loss of ice and degraded habitat. Animals that live in the Arctic will also experience more competition for resources as species move north. And finally, the melting ice contributes to global warming, and while there was no prediction made as to when we might expect the Arctic to be mostly melted, the impacts will be apparent in the world long before most of the ice is lost. Barber said the warming of the Arctic influenced the jet stream, which then causes warm air to move further north.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

The Star this week caught up with Lisi, now 42. And like everything else in his life, the exchange happened on his terms – by email.

The most important update: Lisi writes from Maui that his confidence "has increased" since November 2007, when he posted his theory on arXiv, a database on the Web that accepts scientific papers before they are peer reviewed.

"In fact, I can now make an unusually strong statement: If one believes in the unification of electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, which there's good evidence for, then the unification with gravity and Higgs particles is inevitable. When one continues this unification by including matter (electrons, quarks, neutrinos), this whole structure fits in E8. Mathematically, this is irrefutable."

Labels: science

The mystique of the rovers has even touched Native American culture. Tim McCoy, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, has been on the rover team for the last four years. He’s also a citizen of the Miami tribe from the Midwest. In their Algonquian language, explains McCoy, the Miami confer “animacy” on certain beings, such as people, animals, some plants, and ome natural phenomena, such as thunder. “Anthropomorphizing is not the right word,” he says. “It’s hard to describe. Some things have a living force to them, a spirit of sorts.”The Miami elders decide what types of modern technology have animacy. Cars do. Trains don’t. “I had heard Janet Vertesi talk in a rover team meeting about the boundary in her mind between people and machines,” says McCoy. “She was sort of struggling with that. But from a Native American sense, there’s no struggle there, no apparent conflict.”

McCoy and a Miami tribesman colleague who is a linguist at Miami University of Ohio debated whether the rovers had animacy. They went to a tribal elder and described what a rover is and how it works with humans. The elder pondered the question, then proclaimed that the rovers have animacy. A group of about 20 undergraduates from theMiami tribe at the university then named the rovers “neehpikalaankwa keeyosia,” or “the red star wanderer.” “To the Miami,” says McCoy, “the wanderer performs an important task as he or she gathers useful information during wanderings and brings it back for the community.”

McCoy shared the story with the rover team.“They weren’t surprised. You really feel like this thing is an extension of you. When one of them dies, there’s going to be a tangible loss and a period of grieving.”

Labels: Mars, science, space

Holography in theoretical physics follows broadly the same principles as the holograms on a banknote, which are three-dimensional images embedded in a two-dimensional surface. The concept in physics was developed in the 1970s by Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge and Jacob Bekenstein at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel to describe the properties of black holes. Their work led to the insight that a hypothetical sphere could store all the necessary "bits" of information about the mass within. In the 1990s, 't Hooft and Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in California proposed that this framework might apply to the whole universe. Their "holographic principle" has proved useful in many fundamental theories.

Verlinde uses the holographic principle to consider what is happening to a small mass at a certain distance from a bigger mass, say a star or a planet. Moving the small mass a little, he shows, means changing the information content, or entropy, of a hypothetical holographic surface between both masses. This change of information is linked to a change in the energy of the system.

Then, using statistics to consider all possible movements of the small mass and the energy changes involved, Verlinde finds movements toward the bigger mass are thermodynamically more likely than others. This effect can be seen as a net force pulling both masses together. Physicists call this an entropic force, as it originates in the most likely changes in information content.

Labels: science

Labels: economics and finance, science, SF, society

Labels: science, video

Let's consider yet another cancer Z and a test for it that satisfies the following three conditions:

1.) The probability a person has cancer Z is 1 percent.
2.) If the person has Z, the test is positive 95 percent of the time.
3.) If the person doesn't, the test is still positive 3 percent of the time.

Presented as frequencies the conditions are:

1.) On average 1 out of 100 people have Z.
2.) Of 100 people with Z, 95 will test positive.
3.) Of 100 people who are Z-free, 3 of them will test positive.

However these conditions are presented, the crucial question is what fraction of those people who test positive for Z actually have it. The surprising answer (see below) is about 24 percent, a calculation that studies show many doctors are unable to perform.

Labels: health, science

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

Labels: science, society, The Crazy Years

Labels: science, space

The 3-D renderings were generated by applying an iterative algorithm to a sphere. The same calculation is applied over and over to the sphere’s points in three dimensions. In spirit, that’s similar to how the original 2-D Mandelbrot set generates its infinite and self-repeating complexity.

Labels: computing, science

GJ 758 is a G9-class star of about 0.97 solar masses some fifty light years from the Sun. As to the newly discovered companion, it’s currently about 29 AU out, about the orbital distance of Neptune, but we do not yet have further information on the size and shape of its orbit. At 315 degrees Celsius, the object is the coldest companion yet imaged around a G-class star. A second companion of similar mass is suspected at about 19 AU, roughly the orbital distance of Uranus from the Sun. The presence of massive planets at this distance from their primary challenges our current thinking on planetary formation and may help theorists to refine their models.

Labels: science

These incidents took place at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis, an Environment Canada facility located at the university. In addition, Dr. Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist working at the University of Victoria and a key contributor to the Nobel prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had his office broken into twice late last year, and his papers rummaged through and a dead computer stolen. "The key thing is to try to find anybody who's involved in any aspect of the IPCC and find something that you can...take out of context," Dr. Weaver said.

Labels: environment, science

Labels: photography, science, space

Claim 3: Global warming stopped a decade ago; the earth has been cooling since then.

1998 was the world's warmest year in the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre’s records; recent years have been cooler; therefore, the previous century's global warming trend is over, right?

Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with statistics should be able to spot the weaknesses of that argument. Given the extended duration of the warming trend, the expected (and observed) variations in the rate of increase and the range of uncertainties in the temperature measurements and forecasts, a decade's worth of mild interruption is too small a deviation to prove a break in the pattern, climatologists say.

Recently, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein asked four independent statisticians to look for trends in the temperature data sets without telling them what the numbers represented. "The experts found no true temperature declines over time," he wrote.

Labels: environment, science

Let's look at the amount of money being spent on lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel industry compared to environmental groups to see their relative influence. According to Center for Public Integrity, there are currently 2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill. That's five lobbyists for every member of Congress. Climate lobbyists working for major industries outnumber those working for environmental, health, and alternative energy groups by more than seven to one. For the second quarter of 2009, here is a list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity of all the oil, gas, and coal mining groups that spent more than $100,000 on lobbying (this includes all lobbying, not just climate change lobbying):

Chevron $6,485,000
Exxon Mobil $4,657,000
BP America $4,270,000
ConocoPhillips $3,300,000
American Petroleum Institute $2,120,000
Marathon Oil Corporation $2,110,000
Peabody Investments Corp $1,110,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $980,000
Shell Oil Company $950,000
Arch Coal, Inc $940,000
Williams Companies $920,000
Flint Hills Resources $820,000
Occidental Petroleum Corporation $794,000
National Mining Association $770,000
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity $714,000
Devon Energy $695,000
Sunoco $585,000
Independent Petroleum Association of America $434,000
Murphy Oil USA, Inc $430,000
Peabody Energy $420,000
Rio Tinto Services, Inc $394,000
America's Natural Gas Alliance $300,000
Interstate Natural Gas Association of America $290,000
El Paso Corporation $261,000
Spectra Energy $279,000
National Propane Gas Association $242,000
National Petrochemical & Refiners Association $240,000
Nexen, Inc $230,000
Denbury Resources $200,000
Nisource, Inc $180,000
Petroleum Marketers Association of America $170,000
Valero Energy Corporation $160,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $131,000
Natural Gas Supply Association $114,000
Tesoro Companies $119,000

Here are the environmental groups that spent more than $100,000:

Environmental Defense Action Fund $937,500
Nature Conservancy $650,000
Natural Resources Defense Council $277,000
Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund $243,000
National Parks and Conservation Association $175,000
Sierra Club $120,000
Defenders of Wildlife $120,000
Environmental Defense Fund $100,000

If you add it all up, the fossil fuel industry outspent the environmental groups by $36.8 million to $2.6 million in the second quarter, a factor of 14 to 1. To be fair, not all of that lobbying is climate change lobbying, but that affects both sets of numbers. The numbers don't even include lobbying money from other industries lobbying against climate change, such as the auto industry, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc.

Friends of Science, a Calgary-based non-profit group, is running a national radio advertising campaign mocking the whole idea of climate change that has mainstream environmental groups miffed.

The groups are claiming that funding for the anti-global warming effort is coming from the oil and gas industry.

James Hoggan, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, lashed out Tuesday at Friends of Science in a speech in Toronto, calling it one of several “industry front groups” in North America that are trying to create uncertainty about the existence of climate change to undermine next month's United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen.
The ads, which claim the planet has actually been becoming cooler in the past 10 years, have been running this month in 15 cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary, according to the Friends of Science group.

Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multiyear frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin “rotten” ice which can't support the weight of the bears.

“It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multiyear sea ice – the whole world thought it was multiyear sea ice,” said Dr. Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.

“Unfortunately what we found was that the multiyear [ice] has all but disappeared. What's left is this remnant, rotten ice.”

Permanent ice, which is normally up to 10 metres thick, was easily pierced by the research ship, said Dr. Barber, who holds the Canada research chair in Arctic science at the University of Manitoba.

The team finally reached what it thought was stable ice, only to watch a crack appear just as researchers were preparing to descend onto the floe.

“As I watched, over the course of five minutes, the entire multiyear ice floe broke up into pieces,” Dr. Barber said. “This floe was 10 miles across. Something that's twice the size of Winnipeg, it just broke up right in front of our eyes.”

The ice is unable to withstand battering waves and storms because global warming is rapidly melting it at a rate of 70,000 square kilometres each year, he said.

Multiyear sea ice used to cover 90 per cent of the Arctic basin, Dr. Barber said. It now covers roughly 19 per cent. Where it used to be up to 10 metres thick, it's now two metres at most.

I apologize on behalf of my profession.

If it's true that Canadians and Americans have become less concerned about the potential impact of climate change, and that more consider global warming a hoax, some blame can certainly be directed at the news media.

"The media (are) giving an equal seat at the table to a lot of non-qualified scientists," Julio Betancourt, a senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told a group of environment and energy reporters during a week-long learning retreat in New Mexico.

I was among them, listening to Betancourt and two of his colleagues describe the measurable impacts climate change is having on the U.S. southwest. Drought. More frequent and damaging forest fires. Northward migration of forest and animal species. Hotter, longer growing seasons. Less snow pack. Earlier snow melt.

"The scientific evidence reported in peer-reviewed journals is growing by the day, and it suggests the pace of climate change has surpassed the worst-case scenarios predicted just a few years ago.

The emails, from what I've read, do show that not all scientists agree, that some scientists don't like other scientists, and that some scientists are struggling with the complexity of their work. What these emails do not show is that there's any conspiracy or that consensus around the reality of human-influenced global warming is beginning to crack.

Still, that won't stop the skeptics from cherry picking what's in those emails and claiming this is some kind of smoking gun that will derail Copenhagen. The blogosphere is abuzz, and news media are never ones to turn down a juicy controversy. The timing of the hack makes it all the more suspicious, but no less dramatic.

It's a shame.

Black, they thunder, is white, and – skilled and persistent communicators that they are, with plentiful political, media and industry backing – they manage to convince, or at least confuse, many people.

Keep that in mind when considering the hacking of 4,000 emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, a major centre of climate change study.

Climate skeptics claim a few bits extracted from those generally innocuous discussions among climate scientists – misunderstood or taken out of context – constitute a scandal. The gist: the scientists faked and fudged numbers, then masked their chicanery by attacking their opponents.

They skeptics got what they wanted from what many journalists, apparently without embarrassment, call "Climategate." We're now parsing emails and reporting demands for inquiries instead of focusing on the evidence of human-made climate change.

Tellingly, coverage of a new report that shows greenhouse gas emissions are rising and impacts are happening much faster than previously forecast was dwarfed by excitement over the emails.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

It's getting pretty clear what happened. These academics, who were influential in framing the UN climate report on which most of the political decisions on what to do about man-made global warming depend, became alarmed when the data over the past few years didn't support the predictions of their models. At this point they had a choice: to accept the new data and see what that did to the theory, or simply to cover it up because they were convinced the basic theory was correct and the issue was too important to allow the theory to come under serious doubt.

Evidence of vast conspiracy is sorely lacking. Ditto evidence disproving the scientific consensus on climate change. This isn't the "nail in the coffin" of anything. However, the emails do prompt some legit questions about transparency and how professional researchers respond to criticism in the age of the armchair scientist.

In fact, the whole reason the CRU seems to have been hacked is that the Unit was fighting off requests for access to the data sets it used to put together its climate models. This is one of the issues that gets discussed in the e-mails. Basically, some of the CRU researchers didn't want to release the data to people who weren't trained scientists because they were tired of spending their time fighting with bloggers and wanted to focus on research. Which is great, except for two things: First, from what I'm reading it looks like there might have been some ethical lapses in how the researchers went about blocking the release of data; Second, when you block the release of data, no matter what your real reason is, people will assume it's because you're hiding something nefarious. One of the positive outcomes of this whole hacking debacle is that it's forcing some discussion about when circling the wagons becomes protectionism, and might lead to the climate change data sets becoming more open source. Frankly, I think that's a good thing.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

Labels: photography, science, technology

Much of the 2012 shtick is a light-fingered (if leaden-humored) rip-off of the late rave-culture philosopher Terence McKenna’s stand-up routine, without McKenna’s prodigious erudition, effortless eloquence, or arch wit, and Pinchbeck is no exception. For Quetzalcoatl’s sake, if you’re going to start a religion, at least invent your own cosmology. Even L. Ron Hubbard was canny enough to concoct a pulp theology for ham-radio enthusiasts out of leftover SF plots. But every time I see Pinchbeck’s glum mug, regarding the world with a sort of forced bliss, I think: Would you buy a used eschaton from this man? (McKenna, by the way, knew which side his ectoplasm was buttered on. When I asked him, over dinner, why a man of his obvious intellectual nimbleness endured the saucer abductees and trance-channelers who plucked at his sleeve at New Age seminars, he rolled a knowing eye and replied, I thought wearily, that he owed his daily crust to “menopausal mystics” and thus had to suffer them, if not gladly.)

Labels: movies and television, science

Zuppero's dream begins in 1968 with the scientist inspired by one of Freeman Dyson's well-traveled crackpot ideas - that of powering a spaceship to the nearest star at one per cent of the speed of light, using atomic bombs. (Sci-fi authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle famously employed one in their alien invasion novel, Footfall.)

Working for a government lab, Zuppero asks to view the classified plans, called Orion, for the Dyson space ship.

"I was scrutinizing the drawing [of the space ship]," he writes. "It showed a really dinky and clearly horribly inefficient atomic bomb propulsion device. Nothing like what Freeman Dyson drew... The design seemed to be really dumb, like something one of my fraternity brothers would draw up inbetween periods of getting drunk."

With the bloom only slightly off the rose, Zuppero visits a bunker full of thermonuclear bombs to see the basis for his dream's propulsion. But the bombs are way too big, he observes, and there's no way to get three million of them on a spaceship to the stars. Freeman Dyson should have seen the bomb room, Zuppero writes.

Labels: military, science, space, technology

The profile emerging is of a distinctive virus. Although seasonal flu tends to infect just the cells high in the upper airway, H1N1 penetrates down into the terminal air sacs called alveoli. "This is not an area of the lung where you would usually see seasonal flu," Zaki says. He has seen such behaviour before, though — in the few samples of lung tissue he has examined from humans killed by the H5N1 avian flu virus. But the virus is much more prevalent in the tissues from the severe H1N1 cases he has examined — "like avian flu on steroids" as Zaki puts it.

Zaki says that his observations fit well with recent research looking at the mechanism of infection. A group led by Mikhail Matrosovich at Philipps University Marburg in Germany and Ten Feizi at Imperial College London studied sialyl glycans, glycoproteins that the flu virus binds to in order to gain entry to human cells1. Although seasonal strains of H1N1 bind mostly to versions of the glycoproteins known as α2-6, the researchers found that the new pandemic H1N1 can also bind to a version called α2-3, which is found in greater

Labels: science

A video made two years ago depicting the collapse of Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct has finally been released. It’s pretty sensational–after an earthquake, cars are crushed, half of the city’s power goes out, soil liquifies and whole streets disappear

Labels: Another thing to worry about, science

When listening to Markram speculate, it's easy to forget that the Blue Brain simulation is still just a single circuit, confined within a silent supercomputer. The machine is not yet alive. And yet Markram can be persuasive when he talks about his future plans. His ambitions are grounded in concrete steps. Once the team is able to model a complete rat brain--that should happen in the next two years--Markram will download the simulation into a robotic rat, so that the brain has a body. He's already talking to a Japanese company about constructing the mechanical animal. "The only way to really know what the model is capable of is to give it legs," he says. "If the robotic rat just bumps into walls, then we've got a problem."

Labels: computing, science, technology

Let’s look up close at one element of this flourishing ecosystem: the gradual rise of science blogs as a serious medium for research. It’s easy to miss the impact of blogs on research, because most science blogs focus on outreach. But more and more blogs contain high quality research content. Look at Terry Tao’s wonderful series of posts explaining one of the biggest breakthroughs in recent mathematical history, the proof of the Poincare conjecture. Or Tim Gowers recent experiment in “massively collaborative mathematics”, using open source principles to successfully attack a significant mathematical problem. Or Richard Lipton’s excellent series of posts exploring his ideas for solving a major problem in computer science, namely, finding a fast algorithm for factoring large numbers. Scientific publishers should be terrified that some of the world’s best scientists, people at or near their research peak, people whose time is at a premium, are spending hundreds of hours each year creating original research content for their blogs, content that in many cases would be difficult or impossible to publish in a conventional journal. What we’re seeing here is a spectacular expansion in the range of the blog medium. By comparison, the journals are standing still.

Labels: Internet, science

Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics celebrates its 10th Anniversary with Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future. This innovative festival, October 15th to 25th, will take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe. You can enjoy a wide range of presentations in three ways - onsite in Waterloo, Ontario, on TV in Canada via TVO, and online over the world at Q2Cfestival.com.


Q2C's extensive program features a wide range of interesting speakers providing lectures and discussions at Perimeter Institute. Then, strolling into Uptown Waterloo, you will discover even more ideas at the Physica Phantastica Exhibit, a Sci-Fi Film Fest, Science in the Pub gatherings and screenings of The Quantum Tamers.

Honorary Festival President, Professor Stephen Hawking, takes part in The Quantum Tamers, will appear via multimedia at Perimeter Institute and narrates an immersive 3D journey through the cosmos at the Physica Phantistica Exhibit. Q2C also welcomes school groups and hosts Arts & Cultural events during the festival.

Q2C will transcend traditional festivals by streaming events live and on demand, offering virtual interaction with exhibits, and providing special opportunities for students and teachers.

Labels: science, society

"The past decade has been spectacular in terms of achievements," says Sean Solomon, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a leader of recent missions to Mercury and Mars.

Seven missions are currently keeping a wary eye on the Sun; they were launched by the United States, Japan and Europe, partly for pure science and partly for self-preservation. Solar flares, which can come from sunspots, are magnetic eruptions that sometimes hit Earth. A superflare like the one in 1859 that surged through telegraph lines and ignited fires would black out today's electrical grids, fry communication satellites and jam navigation signals. Missions to track solar flares may alert us to outsize magnetic storms in time to brace ourselves.

Last year, NASA's Messenger mission gave us the first up-close view of parts of Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun. The spacecraft has found extensive ridges along the planet's surface, made as it cooled and shrank over its four billion years. Messenger should nestle into orbit around Mercury in 2011 and continue to study the planet's geology and magnetic fields.

Labels: photography, science, space

For the past two years, Stanford has been rolling out a series of courses (collectively called Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum) that gives you a baseline knowledge for thinking intelligently about modern physics. The sequence, which moves from Isaac Newton, to Albert Einstein’s work on the general and special theories of relativity, to black holes and string theory, comes out of Stanford’s Continuing Studies program (my day job). And the courses are all taught by Leonard Susskind, an important physicist who has engaged in a long running “Black Hole War” with Stephen Hawking. The final course, Statistical Mechanics, has now been posted on YouTube, and you can also find it on iTunes in video. The rest of the courses can be accessed immediately below. Six courses. Roughly 120 hours of content. A comprehensive tour of modern physics. All in video. All free. Beat that.

Labels: education and training, science

Working in the dark, dry highlands of Chile with a Nikon D3 digital camera (50 mm lens open at f5.6), Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier patched together 1,200 photos of the night sky into the composite that you see above.

While many of the most stunning space images come from huge telescopes or Hubble, Brunier wanted to create photographs of space that were closer to the commonplace human experience of just going outside and looking at the sky.

“I wanted to show a sky that everyone can relate to — with its constellations, its thousands of stars, with names familiar since childhood, its myths shared by all civilizations since Homo became Sapiens,” Brunier said in a release. “The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera under the dark skies in the Atacama Desert and on La Palma.”

Labels: photography, science

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

This visualization illustrates some of the rupture and wave propagation phenomena of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault in Southern California. It shows how an earthquake originating 60 miles south of Palm Springs can end up shaking Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara minutes after the original fault rupture. The animation captures more than four minutes of complex dynamic rupture and wave propagation. Nearly 12 terabytes of earthquake simulation data was used to generate the animation.

Labels: computing, science, video

Labels: science, video

Labels: photography, science

A set of seven talks by legendary, Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman are now available online, free of charge–and through a much more versatile application than YouTube.

Microsoft Research has made videos of the famous Messenger Series lectures available through an interactive video application called Project Tuva.

Feynman expanded our understanding of quantum electrodynamics, assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and helped explain the Challenger disaster. But Feynman is also famous for his uncanny ability to convey to others the wonder of science.

Project Tuva gives modern viewers an experience the Cornell University students who originally heard them never had.

The site allows the user to watch Feynman with subtitles; to take notes that link to specific points in the video timeline and video transcript; and to access expert commentary, bibliographic references and Web links, all also linked to points on the video timeline. The user can search the transcript for keywords and then click on those words to watch that section of the video. However, the multimedia presentation can only be viewed in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer using their Silverlight technology.

Labels: science

Because of Zaanen's interest in string theory, he and string theoreticist Koenraad Schalm soon became acquainted after Schalm's arrival in Leiden. Zaanen had an unsolved problem and Schalm was an expert in the field of string theory. Their common interest brought them together, and they decided to work jointly on the research. They used the aspect of string theory known as AdS/CFT correspondence. This allows situations in a large relativistic world to be translated into a description at minuscule quantum physics level. This correspondence bridges the gap between these two different worlds. By applying the correspondence to the situation where a black hole vibrates when an electron falls into it, they arrived at the description of electrons that move in and out of a quantum-critical state.

After days and nights of hard grind, it was a puzzle that fitted. 'We hadn't expected it to work so well,' says a delighted Zaanen. 'The maths was a perfect fit; it was superb. When we saw the calculations, at first we could hardly believe it, but it was right.' Gateway to more

Labels: science

The reporter for Channel 8 asked me what the force actually meant. The best way to describe it would be that a scale placed on the windshield would register between 20 and 120 lbs when the cup hit. That quick calculation convinced me that it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that a drink cup could actually break a windshield. If the cup were thrown, even a pretty bad arm could give it an additional 30-40 mph, so the force could have been much larger.

Labels: science

Labels: science

I’d come to meet Debra Fischer, a professor at San Francisco State University. As a co-discoverer of more than 150 planets, nearly half the known total outside our solar system, she is a prominent figure in astronomy. Her work on this lonely mountaintop could propel her past that, though, into realms of myth and legend. Fischer is using a modest, neglected telescope at CTIO to search for Earth-like planets in Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own. If they exist, she should find them in three to five years.

The implications would be timeless, echoing ancient questions of life’s purpose, outlining futures distant yet possible. Against the certainty of another Earth circling one of the closest stars in the sky, the entirety of recorded history would abruptly seem the briefest prelude to an eternal denouement, a fire kindled to be passed on without end. Alpha Centauri could become a beacon illuminating and bringing significance to the accumulated toils of generations. Driven by the spectral hope of another living world unexplored, our own could profoundly change. Or Fischer’s project could simply fail. Many astronomers assume it will.

Labels: science

The remarkable video, which will be shown as part of the BBC Natural History Unit's new series South Pacific, was filmed in super slow motion using a high-definition camera.

It reveals the hidden power of a four-metre-tall monster barrel wave.

It also shows the first images of underwater spiralling vortices created by the wave's action.

The wave was filmed off the coast of Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands, part of the Federated State of Micronesia.

Labels: photography, science

Labels: science

Lipson and Schmidt designed their program to identify linked factors within a dataset fed to the program, then generate equations to describe their relationship. The dataset described the movements of simple mechanical systems like spring-loaded oscillators, single pendulums and double pendulums — mechanisms used by professors to illustrate physical laws.

The program started with near-random combinations of basic mathematical processes — addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and a few algebraic operators.

Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very familiar: the law of conservation of momentum, and Newton's second law of motion.

Labels: computing, science

There was no point, she realized, in preserving the tapes unless she also had an FR-900 Ampex tape drive to read them. But only a few dozen of the machines had been made for the military. The $330,000 tape drives were electronic behemoths, each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton.

Evans scoured salvage lists for a castoff FR-900. As a member of the federal government's Trash Evaluation Board, she was privy to everything being thrown away from government institutions.

One day in the late 1980s, she got a call from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida: "We heard you're looking for FR-900s. We've got three of them. Where do you want us to send them?"

Having already stretched her bosses' goodwill at JPL by storing the tapes there, she reluctantly agreed to take the drives herself. Evans stored the three tape drives from Eglin and a fourth she got off a salvage list -- none of which worked -- in her own garage.

There they sat, for two decades.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, history, science, space, technology

Lifehacker: How do you plan out a season of MythBusters? How much can you plan ahead, and how much space do you leave yourself to explore stuff you hadn't anticipated?

Adam Savage: The flow of the season happens very much like the flow of an episode. We'll plot out a straight line through an episode, or a season, then it changes radically, constantly. The story list for the next full season, for example, had 60 stories. That came from a master list of about 130, 140 items, from which we'll choose 60. As we film that season, we'll end up following maybe 40 of those, but then 20 new items come up during shooting. All it takes is one more news story for me to realize how I could dig into something.

... There's also room for totally randoms stuff. Jamie came up with this idea of proving you could build a working ship out of wood pulp and water, during the Alaska episode. What we built was stupendous, and what we built wasn't on anybody's list. It normally takes about 9 or 10 days to finish a story, but we try to be flexible. We find a story sometimes we just don't want to sink our teeth into or, more often, need to give more juice to. We had one thing, duct tape, slotted as a three-day story, but we realized that is not a small story. We can turn on the idea that duct tape can do almost anything. So we turned out this episode that takes duct tape to the absolute edge of its performance capabilities.

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The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.

"Our finding is very significant," said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.

"To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device," added the study's co-author in a statement.

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Brian Alters, founder and director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University in Montreal, was shocked by the minister's comments.

Evolution is a scientific fact, Dr. Alters said, and the foundation of modern biology, genetics and paleontology. It is taught at universities and accepted by many of the world's major religions, he said.

“It is the same as asking the gentleman, ‘Do you believe the world is flat?' and he doesn't answer on religious grounds,” said Dr. Alters. “Or gravity, or plate tectonics, or that the Earth goes around the sun.”

Jim Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said he was flabbergasted that the minister would invoke his religion when asked about evolution.

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Using the new method, astronomers can more precisely model the amount and distribution of scattered light produced by young nearby stars suspected of spawning planets, and then subtract the light from images of those stars. Once the glare of the light from the parent stars is removed, young Jupiter-mass planets that emit faint but detectable amounts of heat may show up in images already taken by Hubble’s near-infrared camera.

That’s just what David Lafrenière of the University of Toronto and his colleagues found after examining old Hubble images to look for a planet known to exist around the star HR 8799. Last year, a team led by Christian Marois of the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, which included Lafrenière, used ground-based telescopes to image three planets around that star (SN: 12/6/08, p. 5).

Alerted that another group of astronomers had used the Hubble camera in 1998 to image the same star but had come up empty-handed, Marois, Lafrenière and two collaborators reanalyzed the 11-year-old Hubble images of HR 8799. After subtracting the scattered starlight estimated from the new model, the astronomers recovered the outermost of the trio of planets recently imaged, the team reports online at arXiv.org (http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0902.3247) and in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal Letters. The other two planets, which lie closer to the star, still could not be seen in the Hubble images.

“The first thing it tells you is how valuable maintaining long-term archives can be. Here is a major discovery that’s been lurking in the data for about 10 years!” comments Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which operates Hubble “The second thing its tells you is having a well calibrated archive is necessary but not sufficient to make breakthroughs — it also takes a very innovative group of people to develop very smart extraction routines that can get rid of all the artifacts to reveal the planet hidden under all that telescope and detector structure.”

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Well, mine are rather dull by comparison. I don't see any images. I tend to see things like capital letters and numbers all jumbled up and moving rapidly. It's almost like a sort of Rosetta Stone. I can't actually read anything. All I see are isolated letters and sometimes strings of letters. These flicker and are faint and easily ignored.... They're black and white. I also see chessboards, which again are black and white.... Geometrical patterns go with activity [in] the primary visual cortex.

I also have a sort of "filling in." In my right eye there's something like a huge black inkblot, which occupies most of the visual field there. But if I look up at the ceiling, within two second I can no longer see a black inkblot because it has taken on the white color of the ceiling. And if I look at the carpet, which has a design, within about 20 seconds the carpet fills in [the space of the inkblot].... Incidentally with people with Charles Bonnet Syndrome, 10 or 15 percent of them have images; 80 percent, at least, have geometrical hallucinations. So it is much commoner to get this low-level hallucination in the primary visual cortex, and only in a minority of people does it spread up to the higher levels and give you faces and buildings and birds.

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"TYPICAL RESULTS ARE SHOWN"... This is the prettiest graph.

"THESE RESULTS WILL BE IN A SUBSEQUENT REPORT"... I might get around to this sometime, if pushed/funded.

"IN MY EXPERIENCE"... Once

"IN CASE AFTER CASE"... Twice

"IN A SERIES OF CASES"... Thrice

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The pdf document appears to be the same book that Elsevier published and that I gave a copy of to Heinlein; it has all the rules for creating a habitable planet as well as probabilities for finding them. The book that Asimov co authored sold better and is probably more readable, but when I found that the data and tables were largely missing I stopped reading it, and I don't know where my copy of that one is. In any event the RAND pdf is free and if you want to design a planet, it's a good book to have.

Labels: science, space

Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. At an unknown later time, someone copied the text from papyrus to animal-skin parchment. Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes' book off the shelf, cut the pages in half, rotated them 90 degrees, and scraped the surface to remove the ink, creating a palimpsest—fresh writing material made by clearing away older text. Then he wrote his prayers on the nearly-clean pages.

What happened to the monk's book after that is unclear, but in 1908, Johan Ludwig Heiberg, a Danish philologist, discovered it in a library in Constantinople. He was astonished to find that the book contained previously unknown texts by Archimedes. He studied the book in detail, puzzling out the faint letters with a microscope. His efforts brought the works to the attention of scholars around the world, but after he had completed his transcription, the book again disappeared until nearly a decade ago, when it was auctioned off at Christie's.

The book's anonymous buyer has funded an enormous research project on the volume. First, intensive conservation and restoration stabilized the condition of the book itself. Then the researchers took digital pictures of it in different wavelengths of light, creating a multi-spectral image that could be manipulated to reveal the text by Archimedes. On four of the pages, forged paintings covered the entire text, so the researchers used x-ray fluorescence imaging to peek beneath the paintings and decipher the obscured text.

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• MetaModern is written by Eric K. Drexler, the author of the book Engines of Creation, who helped to popularize the science of nanotechnology.

• Science Insider is a blog written by several editors of Science. It's main focus is science policy.

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The credibility of string theory and the multiverse may get a boost within the next year or two, once physicists start analyzing results from the Large Hadron Collider, the new, $8 billion particle accelerator built on the Swiss-French border. If string theory is right, the collider should produce a host of new particles. There is even a small chance that it may find evidence for the mysterious extra dimensions of string theory. “If you measure something which confirms certain elaborations of string theory, then you’ve got indirect evidence for the multiverse,” says Bernard Carr, a cosmologist at Queen Mary University of London.

Support for the multiverse might also come from some upcoming space missions. Susskind says there is a chance that the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, scheduled for launch early next year, could lend a hand. Some multiverse models predict that our universe must have a specific geometry that would bend the path of light rays in specific ways that might be detectable by Planck, which will analyze radiation left from the Big Bang. If Planck’s observations match the predictions, it would suggest the existence of the multiverse.

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The research team, led by astronomer Christian Marois of the National Research Council Canada/Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, used advanced instrumentation and image-processing techniques known as exoplanet imaging to detect the three faint planets against the bright glare of their host star.

The primary star, barely visible to the naked eye, lies 130 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Its mass is about 1.5 times that of the sun and its age is about 60 million years, significantly less than the sun.

The images were captured by the Gemini North and Keck telescopes at the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii.

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Originally slated for a mere 90 days near the Martian north pole, clever NASA power engineers kept the Lander doing science for nearly two months beyond that goal. But now mission officials are certain: The lander has run out of power for its internal heater and is presumed to be frozen on the arctic plane.

"At this time, we're pretty convinced that the vehicle is no longer available for us to use," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're ceasing operations and declaring an end to mission operations at this point."

As late as last week, the team was still trying to eke a few more experiments out of the robotic lander, even as the declining amount of solar energy in the pole area made their task more difficult.

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Research from 1915 through to the 1950s suggested that the vast majority of dreams are in black and white but the tide turned in the sixties, and later results suggested that up to 83 per cent of dreams contain some colour.

Since this period also marked the transition between black-and-white film and TV and widespread Technicolor, an obvious explanation was that the media had been priming the subjects' dreams.

However it was always controversial and differences between the studies prevented the researchers from drawing any firm conclusions.

But now Miss Murzyn believes she has proved the link. She re-looked at the old studies and combined them with a survey of her own of more 60 people, half of which were over 55 and half of which were under 25.

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The Survey's Sky Server allows you to explore the universe in multiple ways, focusing on the 2 billion light-years closest to Earth. If you know what you're doing, you can even search particular stretches of the universe.

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In space, above our atmosphere, stars do not twinkle; in space a telescope is also beyond day and night and can thus stare at the same star for weeks on end, gradually teasing from its light the barely perceptible but regular flickers caused by a small orbiting planet. A French satellite called Corot, the first space telescope devoted primarily to looking for rocky planets, is in orbit now. An even more capable American mission, Kepler, will be launched in April. It is expected to find hundreds of Earths, including the first ones orbiting stars like the sun at distances like that of our own Earth. Then, in 2013, NASA will launch a giant infrared telescope called the James Webb Space Telescope. An all-purpose observatory, the Webb was not designed to follow up on the discoveries of Corot and Kepler. But if pushed to the limit, it just might be able to provide the first indication of life—a telltale molecule, such as oxygen, in the planet’s atmosphere—on a super-Earth circling another star. By 2014 headlines could be announcing the first tentative evidence of life beyond our solar system.

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Not only were the galaxy clusters moving, but over a span of five billion light-years -- more than a third of the age of the universe -- they were all heading for the same place. It was a truly bizarre and unexpected result.

The measurements suggest far more than the distant clusters are moving, said Kashlinsky. Rather, the entire universe -- including our own galaxy -- is feeling the tug of the unseen mega-mass beyond the edge of the universe.

As for what could be exerting such a powerful, pervasive tug, it can't be anything within our universe, since there just isn't anything with remotely enough mass, said Kocevski. No way. That means it's something we can't see -- beyond the observable universe.

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Three University of Toronto scientists used the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawai‘i to take images of the young star 1RXS J160929.1-210524 (which lies about 500 light-years from Earth) and a candidate companion of that star. They also obtained spectra to confirm the nature of the companion, which has a mass about eight times that of Jupiter, and lies roughly 330 times the Earth-Sun distance away from its star. (For comparison, the most distant planet in our solar system, Neptune, orbits the Sun at only about 30 times the Earth-Sun distance.) The parent star is similar in mass to the Sun, but is much younger.

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It would appear that the US President has been briefed by Phoenix scientists about the discovery of something more "provocative" than the discovery of water existing on the Martian surface. This news comes just as the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) confirmed experimental evidence for the existence of water in the Mars regolith on Thursday. Whilst NASA scientists are not claiming that life once existed on the Red Planet's surface, new data appears to indicate the "potential for life" more conclusively than the TEGA water results. Apparently these new results are being kept under wraps until further, more detailed analysis can be carried out, but we are assured that this announcement will be huge…

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