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"Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage." ~Anain Nin
Galaxy May Have Billions of Planets NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered what they believe are 16 new planets deep in the Milky Way, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread throughout the galaxy. Over the past 15 years, astronomers have identified more than 200 planets outside our solar system, but the new ones identified by the Hubble are at least 10 times as far from Earth. That planets can be found at the center of the galaxy, as well as near our solar system, has given NASA researchers confidence that they are likely to be everywhere. If that is the case, then the likelihood of other Earth-like planets becomes greater. "We all are dreamers, and part of that dream is to find life somewhere," said Mario Livio, head of the science program at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which oversees Hubble operations. "We're finding that the galaxy is full of planets, and the chances are, somewhere out there, we will find one with the conditions necessary to be habitable." The new planets were introduced yesterday as mostly "candidates," since only two could be definitively described as planets. But Livio and team leader Kailash Sahu said the chances are good that some, or even all, of the 16 will ultimately meet all the criteria to be called planets. jaybird found this for you @ 12:21 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
First Teleportation Between Light and Matter At long last researchers have teleported the information stored in a beam of light into a cloud of atoms, which is about as close to getting beamed up by Scotty as we're likely to come in the foreseeable future. More practically, the demonstration is key to eventually harnessing quantum effects for hyperpowerful computing or ultrasecure encryption systems. Quantum computers or cryptography networks would take advantage of entanglement, in which two distant particles share a complementary quantum state. In some conceptions of these devices, quantum states that act as units of information would have to be transferred from one group of atoms to another in the form of light. Because measuring any quantum state destroys it, that information cannot simply be measured and copied. Researchers have long known that this obstacle can be finessed by a process called teleportation, but they had only demonstrated this method between light beams or between atoms. jaybird found this for you @ 08:19 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Enzymes use quantum tunneling to speed up reactions The bizarre, unpredictable world of quantum mechanics would appear unlikely to govern everyday biological processes. However, enzymes—protein catalysts that allow chemical reactions to take place millions of times faster than their normal rate—use a phenomenon called quantum tunneling to transfer protons or electrons to or from a reactant. Until now, nobody knew just how they did it. An interdisciplinary group of UK researchers from the University of Manchester and the University of Bristol examined a single step of a reaction where an enzyme, aromatic amine dehydrogenase, extracts a proton from a substrate called tryptamine, a natural compound related to the neurotransmitter serotonin. The researchers created a computer model of the enzyme and simulated the process. They found that, contrary to what was previously believed, it is not long-range motions of the enzyme, but rather motions close to the substrate, that promote tunneling. "Our present understanding of the physical basis of enzyme catalysis is still unable to explain the many orders of magnitude by which a reaction is 'speeded up' by enzymes, nor why attempts to create artificial enzymes have so far been disappointing," said study co-author David Leys of the University of Manchester via e-mail. "Our work reveals that not only active site structure, but also motions are an essential part of the enzyme's repertoire." jaybird found this for you @ 08:21 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Bacteria Roll Out Carpet Of Goo That Converts Deadly Heavy Metal Into Less Threatening Nano-spheres Since the discovery a little more than a decade ago of bacteria that chemically modify and neutralize toxic metals without apparent harm to themselves, scientists have wondered how on earth these microbes do it. For Shewanella oneidensis, a microbe that modifies uranium chemistry, the pieces are coming together, and they resemble pearls that measure precisely 5 nanometers across enmeshed in a carpet of slime secreted by the bacteria. The pearl is uranium dioxide, or uraninite, which moves much less freely in soil than its soluble counterpart, a groundwater-contamination threat at nuclear waste sites. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that uranium contaminates more than 2,500 billion liters of groundwater nationwide; over the past decade, the agency has support research into the ability of naturally-occurring microbes that can halt the uranium’s underground migration to prevent it from reaching streams used by plants, animals and people. Assembling a battery of evidence, scientists have for the first time placed the bacterial enzymes responsible for converting uranium to uraninite at the scene of the slime, or “extracellular polymeric substance” (EPS), according to a study led by the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in today’s advance online edition of PLoS Biology. “Shewanella really puts a lot of stuff outside the cell,” said PNNL chief scientist Jim Fredrickson, the study’s senior author. “It’s very tactile compared with pathogens, which go into hiding to evade detection by the immune system.” jaybird found this for you @ 14:48 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
U.S. Lags World in Grasp of Genetics and Acceptance of Evolution A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower. Among the factors contributing to America's low score are poor understanding of biology, especially genetics, the politicization of science and the literal interpretation of the Bible by a small but vocal group of American Christians, the researchers say. “American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close,” said study co-author Jon Miller of Michigan State University. The researchers combined data from public surveys on evolution collected from 32 European countries, the United States and Japan between 1985 and 2005. Adults in each country were asked whether they thought the statement “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” was true, false, or if they were unsure. jaybird found this for you @ 20:14 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Researchers solve a 200-year-old Moon mystery In 1994, Maria Zuber, then a geophysicist at Johns Hopkins, was working on a research paper when her 4-year-old son walked into her office and asked what she was up to. "I'm writing a paper on the shape of the Moon,'" Zuber told him. "Mom," he said, "it's round." Scientists have known for centuries that the Moon isn't round. Rather, the Moon is a flattened sphere—like a football—and is elongated on the side that faces the Earth. Despite this knowledge, scientists have been mystified that the Moon's distorted dimensions don't match their predictions, given its current orbit and distance from Earth. The Moon, mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace noted in 1799, is too deformed and too flat. Scientists tried to develop models of the Moon's early orbit that could explain how the distortions formed, but they always failed—no matter how close they moved the Moon's orbit to the Earth, or how fast they made it spin. No solution matched the Moon's exact dimensions. Now, in the Aug. 4th issue of Science, Zuber, now at MIT, teams up with two colleagues to provide the first defensible answer to the 200-year-old puzzle of how the Moon got its figure. jaybird found this for you @ 20:28 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Transforming the Alchemists There was no place in the annals of empirical science, beginning mainly in the 18th century, for the occult practices of obsessed dreamers who sought most famously and impossibly to transform base metals into pure gold. So alchemy fell into disrepute. But in the revival of scholarship on the field, historians are finding reasons to give at least some alchemists their due. Even though they were secretive and self-deluded and their practices closer to magic than modern scientific methods, historians say, alchemists contributed to the emergence of modern chemistry as a science and an agent of commerce. “Experimentalism was one of alchemy’s hallmarks,” said Lawrence M. Principe, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University and a trained chemist. “You have to get your hands dirty, and in this way alchemists forged some early ideas about matter.” Bent over boiling crucibles in their shadowy laboratories, squeezing bellows before transformative flames and poring over obscure formulas, some alchemists stumbled on techniques and reactions of great value to later chemists. It was experimentation by trial and error, historians say, but it led to new chemicals and healing elixirs and laid the foundations of procedures like separating and refining, distilling and fermenting. “What do chemists do? They like to make stuff,” Dr. Principe said. “Most chemists are interested not so much in theory as in making substances with particular properties. The emphasis on products was the same with some alchemists in the 17th century.” jaybird found this for you @ 08:09 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Finding the Higgs-Boson: Take one small black hole They must be eternal optimists. How else would you explain the plan by physicists to look for a hypothetical particle, the Higgs boson, by sifting through the remnants of an evaporating mini black hole, which itself may or may not exist? The Higgs boson, which is thought to give all other particles their mass, was first proposed in the 1960s, but has so far escaped detection. One of the primary goals of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle accelerator being built at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, will be to search for the Higgs in the shower of particles generated when two high-energy proton beams collide. It wont be easy. Physicists predict that the Higgs will be created just once in every 10 trillion collisions. With an estimated 800 million collisions a second when the LHC is running, thats still just a handful of Higgs a day, so seeing one is a really remote possibility. This prompted Gouranda Nayak and Jack Smith of Stony Brook University in New York to look for alternatives. Could the Higgs be found, they wondered, in debris left behind by mini black holes, which physicists think could be created in the LHC if the universe has extra dimensions? Although the chances of making mini black holes are slim, preparations for detecting them are already under way (New Scientist, 23 April 2005, p 38). Black hole production has long odds, but high stakes, says Ben Allanach, a physicist at the University of Cambridge. Theory predicts that, once created, a mini black hole would immediately evaporate in a blaze of Hawking radiation, releasing all manner of particles in the process, including the Higgs. It sounds crazy, but if mini black holes can be created then the Higgs must be produced, says Smith. jaybird found this for you @ 20:14 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
The Sky: Yes, it's Blue: But why? Why is the sky blue? It is a question children ask. Yet it also intrigued Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton, among many other legendary thinkers. As late as 1862, the great astronomer John Herschel called the colour and polarization of skylight "great standing enigmas." Even today, our perception of sky blue is little understood by laymen. Plato speculated that the sky's colour emerged from the interaction of the air with the celestial darkness beyond. Ancient Muslim thinkers speculated that the colour came from particles or "vapors" in the air, perhaps thinking of the dust-filled desert sky. Ibn al-Haytham noted that its hue is not uniform but deeper at the zenith, and whiter near the horizon, even on very clear days. Al-Biruni climbed the highest mountain in Persia and noticed the deep blue, almost black, skies at high altitudes. These writings reached the West, where the 12th century monk Ristoro d'Arezzo connected sky blue with the way skilled painters can make the appearance of pale blue by delicately washing pure black pigment over white. Leonardo da Vinci followed Ristoro's speculations and their artistic implications. He noted the distinct blue of smoke and also the progressively deeper blue of distant mountains, the "aerial perspective" often used in the backgrounds of his paintings. He climbed Monte Rosa and speculated that its blue skies were due to "minute, imperceptible particles" suspended in the air like a fine smoke. Drawing on his love of tennis, Rene Descartes compared blue skylight to balls without spin, and analogized red sunsets to balls spinning because of their passage through a longer reach of the atmosphere. (He never seems to have questioned whether his explanation was really true or merely ingenious.) In contrast, Newton drew on the beautiful blue he noted in thin films of oil or in soap bubbles, concluding that water droplets suspended in air could explain sky blue. Yet Newton does not seem to have asked himself the obvious question: How could water droplets remain suspended sufficiently long to explain the blue sky, especially on dry days when the sky seems particularly blue? jaybird found this for you @ 20:30 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
REVERSING AND ACCELERATING THE SPEED OF LIGHT Physicist Costas Soukoulis and his research group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory on the Iowa State University campus are having the time of their lives making light travel backwards at negative speeds that appear faster than the speed of light. That, folks, is a mind-boggling 186,000 miles per second – the speed at which electromagnetic waves can move in a vacuum. And making light seem to move faster than that and in reverse is what Soukoulis, who is also an ISU Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said is “like rewriting electromagnetism.” He predicted, “Snell’s law on the refraction of light is going to be different; a number of other laws will be different.” However, neither Soukoulis nor any other scientist involved in efforts to manipulate the direction and speed of light can do so with naturally occurring materials. The endeavor requires exotic, artificially created materials. Known as metamaterials, these substances can be manipulated to respond to electromagnetic waves in ways that natural materials cannot. Natural materials refract light, or electromagnetic radiation, to the right of the incident beam at different angles and speeds. However, metamaterials, also called left-handed materials, make it possible to refract light at a negative angle, so it emerges on the left side of the incident beam. This backward-bending characteristic of metamaterials allows enhanced resolution in optical lenses, which could potentially lead to the development of a flat superlens with the power to see inside a human cell and diagnose disease in a baby still in the womb. The challenge that Soukoulis and other scientists face who work with metamaterials is to fabricate them so that they refract light negatively at ever smaller wavelengths, with the ultimate goal of making a metamaterial that refracts light at visible wavelengths and achieving the much-sought-after superlens. Admittedly, that goal is a jaybird found this for you @ 20:11 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Redesigning Life to Make Ethanol On January 31, Ari Patrinos was sitting in his living room in Rockville, MD, listening to the State of the Union speech and slowly nodding off. Suddenly, he was jolted awake. "We'll also fund additional research for cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol," President Bush was saying on the television, "not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switchgrass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years." Unlike most of the legislators who gamely applauded the president's words, Patrinos understood exactly what they meant. In fact, he had dashed them off himself days earlier at the harried request of his boss, unaware that they were destined for the State of the Union speech. Patrinos, then associate director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research, had been touting cellulosic ethanol as an alternative energy source for years, only to be met with indifference or ridicule. Now, it seemed, even the most petro-friendly of politicians was convinced. Producing ethanol fuel from biomass is attractive for a number of reasons. At a time of soaring gas prices and worries over the long-term availability of foreign oil, the domestic supply of raw materials for making biofuels appears nearly unlimited. Meanwhile, the amount of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere annually by burning fossil fuels is projected to rise worldwide from about 24 billion metric tons in 2002 to 33 billion metric tons in 2015. Burning a gallon of ethanol, on the other hand, adds little to the total carbon in the atmosphere, since the carbon dioxide given off in the process is roughly equal to the amount absorbed by the plants used to produce the next gallon. jaybird found this for you @ 14:09 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Scientists Question Nature's Fundamental Laws Public confidence in the "constants" of nature may be at an all time low. Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the invisible glue that holds nuclei together, may have been different in the past. "There is absolutely no reason these constants should be constant," says astronomer Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "These are famous numbers in physics, but we have no real reason for why they are what they are." The observed differences are small—roughly a few parts in a million—but the implications are huge: The laws of physics would have to be rewritten, not to mention we might need to make room for six more spatial dimensions than the three that we are used to. The evidence for varying constants focuses primarily on quasar studies. Quasars are extremely luminous objects, powered by giant black holes. Some of them are so far away that their light was emitted 12 billion years ago. Astronomers study the spectra of this ancient light to determine if the early universe was different than now. Specifically, they look at absorption lines, which are due to gas clouds between us and the quasars. Astronomers study the spectra of this ancient light to determine if the early universe was different than now. Specifically, they look at absorption lines, which are due to gas clouds between us and the quasars. The lines reveal exactly what is in the clouds, since each type of atom has a "fingerprint"—a set of specific frequencies at which it absorbs. In 1999, Murphy and his colleagues found the first convincing evidence that these fingerprints change with time. Using data from the Keck observatory in Hawaii, they detected a frequency difference between billion-year-old quasar lines and the corresponding lines measured on Earth. Some of these Earth-bound lines were not well characterized, so Murphy and others recently performed careful lab experiments to confirm that there is indeed a shift in the quasar spectra. A spectra is basically light split into its component frequencies, much like when white light goes through a prism to produce a rainbow. jaybird found this for you @ 20:57 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Finches on Galapagos Islands Evolving (imagine that!) Finches on the Galapagos Islands that inspired Charles Darwin to develop the concept of evolution are now helping confirm it - by evolving. A medium sized species of Darwin's finch has evolved a smaller beak to take advantage of different seeds just two decades after the arrival of a larger rival for its original food source. The altered beak size shows that species competing for food can undergo evolutionary change, said Peter Grant of Princeton University, lead author of the report appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Grant has been studying Darwin's finches for decades and previously recorded changes responding to a drought that altered what foods were available. It's rare for scientists to be able to document changes in the appearance of an animal in response to competition. More often it is seen when something moves into a new habitat or the climate changes and it has to find new food or resources... jaybird found this for you @ 14:55 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Itchy: Bacteria made to sprout conducting nanowires
Bacteria that use sugars and sewage as fuel are being investigated as a pollution-free source of electricity. They feed by plucking electrons from atoms in their fuel and dumping them onto the oxygen or metal atoms in the mixture. The transfer of the electrons creates a current, and connecting the bacteria to an electrode in a microbial fuel cell will generate electricity, although not necessarily very efficiently. A species of bacterium called Geobacter sulfurreducens, which dumps electrons onto metal, has previously been persuaded to grow nanowires to make contact with distant atoms. A deficit of metal atoms in the close vicinity of the bacteria can cause a bottleneck, so the proliferation of nanowires allows the bacteria to consume more fuel, potentially boosting the current produced by a microbial fuel cell. Now a study by Yuri Gorby of Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Washington State, US, and colleagues reveals that several other kinds of bacteria produce similar nanowires. jaybird found this for you @ 08:52 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
It's 2025. Where Do Most People Live?
The work, Mapping the Future, is the result of collaboration between CCSR, Hunter College and Population Action International (PAI) and was released this spring in conjunction with an update of PAI’s Web feature, People in the Balance, investigating the relationship between human population and critical natural resources. The map indicates that the greatest increases in population density through 2025 are likely to occur in areas of developing countries that are already quite densely populated. In addition, the number of people living within 60 miles of a coastline is expected to increase by 35 percent over 1995 population levels, exposing 2.75 billion people worldwide to the effects of sea level rise and other coastal threats posed by global warming. The map also projects that much of southern and Eastern Europe and Japan will experience significant and wide-spread population decline. Surprisingly, the map further suggests small areas of projected population decline for many regions in which they might be least expected: sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, the Philippines, Nepal, Turkey, Cambodia, Burma and Indonesia — areas that have to date been experiencing rapid-to-modest national population growth. jaybird found this for you @ 20:18 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Ornithopter! Aviation history is made by 'flapper'
Yesterday Dr. James DeLaurier, an aeronautical engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies, fulfilled a lifelong dream, seeing his manned mechanical flapping-wing airplane, or ornithopter, fly — a dream first imagined by Leonardo da Vinci. And with the successful flight DeLaurier has been lucky enough to touch what many describe as the Holy Grail of aeronautical design, achieving a place for himself, his team of volunteers and students in aviation history. The flapper, as it's affectionately known, sustained flight over about a third of a kilometre for 14 seconds at about 10:20 a.m. before being hit by a crosswind and almost flipping over, damaging the nose and front wheel on the runway at Downsview Park. But the flight was long enough to prove DeLaurier's mechanical flapping-wing design for a manned, jet-boosted aircraft works. The successful test flight was longer than the first powered flight by aviation pioneers the Wright brothers in December 1903 that lasted 12 seconds over a windswept beach in North Carolina. Beating that record was enough for DeLaurier. "It is a perfect day," he said after the flight. "If I have the big one now, I'll die happy." After four attempts at getting the ornithopter in the air, the fifth brought glory. The ornithopter, which looks like a cross between an old-fashioned plane and a Canada goose, took off and flew about two metres in the air. DeLaurier whooped and hollered from a truck by the side of the runway, watching it with complete wonder and joy. jaybird found this for you @ 20:15 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Understanding of Human Body Clock Reworked The bodies of humans and other mammals know what time it is by constantly measuring the concentration of a protein called PER in the body. Drug companies are currently working on ways to manipulate the level of PER in the body to treat disorders caused by disruptions to the body's clock, or "circadian rhythm." The degradation of PER is regulated by another protein, called CK1e, whose production is controlled by the gene casein kinase 1, or CK1. A mutation called "tau" in CK1 was previously thought to lead to the production of defective CK1e proteins that break down PER slower than is normal, causing the protein to accumulate in the body. The buildup of PER, it was thought, sped up a mammal's internal clock, causing it to have shorter days. However, the new study finds that actually the opposite occurs: The tau mutation doesn't slow down PER degradation—it speeds it up. Thus, it is not excess PER that leads to shorter days in affected animals, but not enough PE jaybird found this for you @ 12:12 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Dawkins on Evolutionary Engineering Richard Dawkins discusses how ideas borrowed from biological evolution may be used to arrive at optimal adaptive solutions in engineering. jaybird found this for you @ 20:14 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
THE FUTURE OF FUSION
On May 24, the US, EU, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan and India signed on to help build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, in the south of France. ITER is the largest fusion research project to date and one of the biggest international scientific collaborations ever. Its budget is 10 billion euros over 20 years, more than three times that of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The reactor is scheduled to be functional by 2016. "[ITER] is not only a scientific and technological experiment aimed at demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy, but it is also an experiment in international relations," said Ned Sauthoff, the U.S. project manager for ITER. "Never before have the governments representing more than half the population of the world gotten together and tried to solve a global problem." Theoretically, fusion is an ideal energy source. It releases no carbon into the atmosphere and is fueled by hydrogen atoms, which can easily be derived from water. jaybird found this for you @ 08:10 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
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On the trail of quantum pulp We've all seen it: Humphrey Bogart in black and white, chasing crooks through shadows and down dreary alleys. The moody, hard-boiled noir that Bogie personified defined an age of wartime anomie in Europe and the US, and made for gritty, stimulating film and novels. Today, the chiaroscuro tone of pulp is not only found in repertory theaters and airport bookshops: Detective narratives are turning up in efforts to solve the deepest mysteries of quantum mechanics. Creative fiction is a powerful device for elucidating complex quantum phenomena, both for informing the public and among physicists themselves. Whodunits are natural fits for the portrayal, for example, of the duplicity of light: In the infamous double-slit experiments, photons seemingly change properties to avoid detection of their true nature by playing both sides of the wave-particle duality. jaybird found this for you @ 08:41 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Some (atomic) fundamentals may change as time goes by
A new study in the journal Physical Review Letters suggests that over the lifetime of the cosmos, some fundamental things may not be so fundamental. The study, led by physicists Wim Ubachs and Elmar Reinhold of the Free University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, suggests that "mu," the mass ratio of two atomic particles — the proton and the electron — "could have decreased in the past 12 billion years." At that's an interesting notion to physicists, who rely on this fundamental constant to understand the structure of the atoms inside stars, planets and people. In more technical terms, mu sets the scale of the "strong" nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces in the universe (gravity, electromagnetism and the weak force that governs radioactivity are the others.) The strong force binds the sub-atomic particles called quarks to one another inside protons. As fundamental stuff goes, that's pretty fundamental. Measured today, the ratio indicates that a proton weighs (just roughly speaking here) 1836.15267261 times more than an electron. The study team compared the value of mu measured today to the value measured in the light from a pair of quasars, thought to be super-massive black holes sucking in huge amounts of gas and star dust. The quasars' light was measured by study team members at a European Southern Observatory telescope in Chile. Since the quasars are about 12 billion light years away, it has taken 12 billion years for their light to reach Earth, making them indicators of conditions when the universe was only about 1.7 billion years old. By combining today's mu measurement with the mu measurement from the chemical spectrum of light from the quasars, the European team suggests that mu has dropped by 0.002% over the last 12 billion years. Not much of a drop, but it may have big implications, says astrophysicist Michael Murphy of the United Kingdom's Cambridge University. "If we find that the fundamental constants are in fact changing, then they must not be numbers set into the fabric of fundamental physics — rather they are dynamical quantities which change according to some deeper laws of physics that we are yet to understand," he says. "Those deeper laws are likely more fundamental than our present ones and may even point the way to a Grand Unified Theory which brings together the four known forces of nature." jaybird found this for you @ 14:09 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Bring me a God helmet, and bring it now One of the biggest disappointments of my so-called adult life is the sad realisation that I can neither fly nor move objects with the power of my mind. This sucks. But for all their broken promises, as the prison ships become more and more crowded, when I am prime minister of the One World Government, the psychics will be left well alone. They're just too much fun. Up in Scotland, the Evening Mail has been teasing "Angela's Live Psychic Line": the adverts say their psychics are the "real thing" and "truly gifted" at only 75p a minute. Apparently Angela was recruiting, so one cheeky scamp at the Evening Mail thought she'd apply for a job: this is the great British sport of "moron baiting", and it's a game we can all play. After a gruelling 10-minute phone interview the reporter had a new job. Psychic Angela asked her for a test reading; the reporter told her she was "at a crossroads but on the brink of success", and was hired immediately, despite being neither "truly gifted" nor, more importantly, "the real thing". "Her crystal ball must have been on the blink when she signed up our reporter to dupe gullible punters," said the Evening Mail. But of course, there is a natural human drive to seek out the transcendent. A "neurotheology" researcher called Dr Michael Persinger has developed something called the "God Helmet" lined with magnets to help you in your quest: it sounds like typical bad science fodder, but it's much more interesting than that. Persinger is a proper scientist. The temporal lobes have long been implicated in religious experiences: epileptic seizures in that part of the brain, for example, can produce mystical experiences and visions. Persinger's helmet stimulates these temporal lobes with weak electromagnetic fields through the skull, and in various published papers this stimulation has been shown to induce a "sensed presence", under blinded conditions. There is controversy around these findings: some people have tried to replicate them, although not using exactly the same methods, and got different results. But however improbable or theologically offensive you might find his evidence, because it is published and written up in full, you can try to replicate it for yourself and find out whether it works. In fact, you really can try this at home: the kit needed to make a God Helmet is fabulously rudimentary. jaybird found this for you @ 08:46 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Crows Have Human-Like Intelligence  Crows make tools, play tricks on each other, and caw among kin in a dialect all their own. These are just some of the signs presented in a recent book that point to an unexpected similarity between the wise birds and humans. "It's the same kind of consonance we find between bats that can fly and birds that can fly and insects that can fly," said Candace Savage, a nature writer based in Saskatoon, Canada. "Species don't have to be related for there to have been some purpose, some reason, some evolutionary advantage for acquiring shared characteristics," she added. Savage's book, Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys of the Avian World (October 2005), explores the burgeoning field of crow research, which suggests that the birds share with humans several hallmarks of higher intelligence, including tool use and sophisticated social behavior. The shared traits exist despite the fact that crows and humans sit on distinct branches of the genetic tree. Humans are mammals. Crows are birds, which Savage calls feathered lizards, referring to the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs. "I'm not positing there's anything mythological about this or imagining crows are in any way human," she said. "But whatever it is that has encouraged humans to develop higher intelligence also seems to have been at work on crows." [more...] jaybird found this for you @ 14:57 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Physicists create great balls of fire ![](http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn9293/dn9293-1_250.jpg")
Ball lightning – the mysterious slow-moving spheres of light occasionally seen during thunderstorms – has been created in the lab. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the Humboldt University, both in Berlin, have used underwater electrical discharges to generate luminous plasma clouds resembling ball lightning that last for nearly half a second and are up to 20 centimetres across. They hope that these artificial entities will help them understand the bizarre phenomenon and perhaps even provide insights into the hot plasmas needed for fusion power plants. You can watch a super-slow-motion video of the ball lightning here (3.7MB AVI). Ball lightning has puzzled scientists for centuries. Though little reliable data exist, there have been many anecdotal sightings, with people as diverse and famous as Charlemagne, Henry II and the physicist Niels Bohr all claiming to have seen it. In 1753, Russian scientist Georg Richmann may even have been killed by it while trying to trap lightning, becoming the first recorded person to die while conducting electrical experiments. Most accounts describe a hovering, glowing, ball-like object up to 40 centimetres across, ranging in colour from red to yellow to blue and lasting for several seconds or in rare cases even minutes. Many scientists believe ball lightning is a ball of plasma formed when lightning strikes the ground, but the exact mechanism is unclear despite the many theories proposed. jaybird found this for you @ 20:02 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Celebrating the commonplace Consider starlight. What could be more commonplace than starlight? Arcturus is high in the southeast these evenings. Arcturus is 36 light-years away. That's 216 trillion miles. And I saw it. It's not like a special ray of light came from Arcturus to my eyes. That's what we often imagine. We've seen so many pictures of Stars of Bethlehem and Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars with beams of light shooting straight down to Earth that it's easy to believe that the light from the star is somehow directed towards us, personally. But, of course, when we think about it, we realize that this is not so. The light from a star radiates in every direction, like a constantly expanding balloon of energy, getting weaker all the time. Only the tiniest fraction of a star's light falls upon the Earth. How much? Let's do the calculation. Don't be put off by the numbers; just wait for the bottom line. At a distance of 216 trillion miles, the light of Arcturus is spread out over a sphere with an area of 586,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 square miles. The Earth has a cross-sectional area of about 50 million square miles. So the fraction of Arcturus' light that falls upon the Earth is about 1 part out of 10 sextillions. That's 1 followed by 22 zeros. Of the starlight that falls on Earth, an even tinier fraction enters the pupil of my eye to form an image of the star. Another calculation: How does the area of my pupil compare to the cross-sectional area of the Earth? I'll spare you the details. Click, click, click on the calculator. Another factor of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000, more or less. So the fraction of Arcturus' light that enters my eye is one part out of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. jaybird found this for you @ 12:30 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Brain imaging sheds new light on decision making Researchers are investigating connections between pictures created by functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and their depictions of “unfairness” in the brain to further illuminate the neurological basis of moral decision-making. Colin Camerer is a business economics professor at the California Institute of Technology and an expert on “behavioral game theory,” a specialty within the field of behavioral economics. He is using experimental evidence to show how people react to examples of fairness and how that influences their behavior in situations described by a mathematical model of analysis called “game theory.” Pictures of “your brain on unfairness,” culled by Camerer as part of his research, represent “one of the most striking neuroscientific findings about game theory,” he said. In the experiment that produced the brain images, people played an ultimatum game. In this version of the game, a “proposer” offers a portion of $10 to a “responder” — for example, $5 for each player. If the responder accepts it, the players each get their proposed share of the $10. If the responder refuses, neither player wins anything. The test subject whose results were pictured in the fMRI scans added an unusual twist to the game. In some trials, the responder had the photograph and the name of a hidden proposer with whom he played the game. In other cases, the responder was shown a picture of a computer and told that the computer would be the hidden proposer. jaybird found this for you @ 16:47 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Confessions of a Darwinist I take being called anti-Darwinian very personally. It has always hurt, for I have always thought of myself as more or less a knee-jerk neo-Darwinian, someone who thinks the basic mechanism underlying evolutionary change, including the origin, modification, and maintenance of adaptations, resides squarely in the domain of natural selection. And I have always felt that, with one or two major exceptions, my version of how the evolutionary process works lines up very well with Darwin’s. Take natural selection, for example: I see natural selection just as Darwin originally did—as the statistical effect that relative success in the economic sphere (obtaining energy resources, warding off predators and disease, etc.) has on an organism’s success in reproducing. This conservative view contrasts strongly with the modern tendency to see natural selection as a matter of competition among genes to leave copies of themselves to the next generation—a position I take to be hopelessly teleological, obfuscating the real interactive dynamics of economic and reproductive organismic behavior driving the evolutionary process. jaybird found this for you @ 12:46 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Cyclic universe could explain cosmic balancing act A bouncing universe that expands and then shrinks every trillion years or so could explain one of the most puzzling problems in cosmology: how we can exist at all. If this explanation, proposed in Science by Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University, New Jersey, and Neil Turok at the University of Cambridge, UK, seems slightly preposterous, that can't really be held against it. Astronomical observations over the past decade have shown that "we live in a preposterous universe", says cosmologist Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago. "It's our job to make sense of it," he says. In Steinhardt and Turok's cyclic model of the Universe, it expands and contracts repeatedly over timescales that make the 13.7 billion years that have passed since the Big Bang seem a mere blink. This makes the Universe vastly old. And that in turn means that the mysterious 'cosmological constant', which describes how empty space appears to repel itself, has had time to shrink into the strangely small number that we observe today. [via corpus mmothra] jaybird found this for you @ 21:10 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
We made it! The Great Trasition When we look back after 370 million years of evolution, the invasion of land by fish appears special. However, if we could transport ourselves by time machine to this early period, it isn't clear whether we would notice anything extraordinary. We would see a lot of fish, some of them big and some of them small, all of them struggling to survive and reproduce. Only now, 370 million years later, do we see that one of those fish sat at the base of a huge branch of the tree of life—a branch that includes everything from salamanders to humans. It would have taken an uncanny sixth sense for us to have predicted this outcome when our time machine deposited us in the middle of the Devonian. jaybird found this for you @ 12:54 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Plankton blooms linked to quakes Concentrations of the natural pigment chlorophyll in coastal waters have been shown to rise prior to earthquakes. These chlorophyll increases are due to blooms of plankton, which use the pigment to convert solar energy to chemical energy via photosynthesis. A joint US-Indian team of researchers analysed satellite data on ocean coastal areas lying near the epicentres of four recent quakes... They say that monitoring peaks in chlorophyll could provide early information on an impending earthquake. The authors say the chlorophyll blooms are linked to a release of thermal energy prior to an earthquake. This causes the sea surface temperature to rise and increases the surface latent heat flux - the amount of energy moving from the surface to the air due to evaporation. jaybird found this for you @ 16:12 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
That dang bang: The First Few Microseconds For the past five years, hundreds of scientists have been using a powerful new atom smasher at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island to mimic conditions that existed at the birth of the universe. Called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced "rick"), it clashes two opposing beams of gold nuclei traveling at nearly the speed of light. The resulting collisions between pairs of these atomic nuclei generate exceedingly hot, dense bursts of matter and energy to simulate what happened during the first few microseconds of the big bang. These brief "mini bangs" give physicists a ringside seat on some of the earliest moments of creation. During those early moments, matter was an ultrahot, superdense brew of particles called quarks and gluons rushing hither and thither and crashing willy-nilly into one another. A sprinkling of electrons, photons and other light elementary particles seasoned the soup. This mixture had a temperature in the trillions of degrees, more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun's core. But the temperature plummeted as the cosmos expanded, just like an ordinary gas cools today when it expands rapidly. The quarks and gluons slowed down so much that some of them could begin sticking together briefly. After nearly 10 microseconds had elapsed, the quarks and gluons became shackled together by strong forces between them, locked up permanently within protons, neutrons and other strongly interacting particles that physicists collectively call "hadrons." Such an abrupt change in the properties of a material is called a phase transition (like liquid water freezing into ice). The cosmic phase transition from the original mix of quarks and gluons into mundane protons and neutrons is of intense interest to scientists, both those who seek clues about how the universe evolved toward its current highly structured state and those who wish to understand better the fundamental forces involved. The protons and neutrons that form the nuclei of every atom today are relic droplets of that primordial sea, tiny subatomic prison cells in which quarks thrash back and forth, chained forever. Even in violent collisions, when the quarks seem on the verge of breaking out, new "walls" form to keep them confined. Although many physicists have tried, no one has ever witnessed a solitary quark drifting all alone through a particle detector. jaybird found this for you @ 12:58 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Dark Star: Evidence mounts for sun's companion The recent discovery of Sedna, a small planet like object first detected by Cal Tech astronomer Dr. Michael Brown, provides what could be indirect physical evidence of a solar companion. Matching the recent findings by Dr. Brown, showing that Sedna moves in a highly unusual elliptical orbit, Cruttenden has determined that Sedna moves in resonance with previously published orbital data for a hypothetical companion star. In the May 2006 issue of Discover, Dr. Brown stated: "Sedna shouldn't be there. There's no way to put Sedna where it is. It never comes close enough to be affected by the sun, but it never goes far enough away from the sun to be affected by other stars... Sedna is stuck, frozen in place; there's no way to move it, basically there's no way to put it there – unless it formed there. But it's in a very elliptical orbit like that. It simply can't be there. There's no possible way - except it is. So how, then?" "I'm thinking it was placed there in the earliest history of the solar system. I'm thinking it could have gotten there if there used to be stars a lot closer than they are now and those stars affected Sedna on the outer part of its orbit and then later on moved away. So I call Sedna a fossil record of the earliest solar system. Eventually, when other fossil records are found, Sedna will help tell us how the sun formed and the number of stars that were close to the sun when it formed." Walter Cruttenden agrees that Sedna's highly elliptical orbit is very unusual, but noted that the orbit period of 12,000 years is in neat resonance with the expected orbit periodicity of a companion star as outlined in several prior papers. jaybird found this for you @ 08:17 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
A Quantum Blender: Life, the Universe, and Everything Q: You've jumped from working on quantum computers to saying, oh, by the way, the universe is a gigantic quantum computer. Q:What is the universe computing when we are not hijacking it for our own purposes? Q:Um, how many times have you seen The Matrix? Q:When did you first start having these visions? Q:How do you explain Programming to your kids? Q: Do they believe you? Q:I've just put on your magic glasses, and looking around I see that, oh my gosh, everything is computing. Is this just fashionable? |
The discovery that a wide variety of bacteria can be persuaded to produce wire-like appendages that conduct electricity could prove vital to the development of more efficient biological fuel cells.
The innovative map shows a world with large areas of population loss in parts of Eastern Europe and Asia, but significant gains elsewhere.
For an aeronautical engineer it was the perfect day and a perfect end to a quest that has consumed his life for more than 30 years.
It's hard to take fusion energy seriously when its proponents employ descriptors like "power of the Sun" and "energy from a star" to explain it. This kind of hyperbole—and the fact that scientists have never created a sustained fusion reaction capable of generating more electricity than it soaks up—make fusion sound like a fantastical scheme devised by Lex Luthor. But in the wake of the current energy crisis, new money and political support may finally channel enough resources into fusion to make the elusive process a reality.
"The fundamental things apply, as time goes by," sings Sam, the pianist in Casablanca. But maybe Sam didn't mean that to apply over 12 billion years.