Posts Tagged ‘Science’
Asteroid mining will give us all the platinum we’ll ever need, and maybe start a new Space Age [Asteroid Mining]
19
Jul
Your Superhuman Brain
15
Jul
Jess Bachman has a cool new infographic out -- it's all about the human brain. Specifically....
It's about super savants, you know, like Rain Man. But they are not always handicapped like that. In fact, the ability might be in all of us. It's also amazing how fundamentally our brains are connected to, and adapted to, music.Superhuman: The Incredible Savant Brain
Plants can think and perform computations, say scientists [Mad Science]
14
Jul
What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain [Explainer]
13
Jul
Cells have many ways to live, only a couple of ways to die
12
Jul
Robert Horvitz's Nobel Prize came largely for his work in turning a small, transparent worm that lives in the dirt into an experimental system that has won several others Nobel Prizes since. But his pioneering use of C. elegans came about because he was interested in a problem that was simply easier to address in the animal: how and when cells in an organism choose to die through a process called apoptosis. It was his research in this field that was the focus of his talk at the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting.
You might not be aware of it, but many of an animal's cells kill themselves for the greater good of the organism they're part of. In adults, cells with a viral infection or extensive DNA damage (or immune cells that react to the body itself) are induced to commit an organized suicide, slicing up their DNA into short fragments and packaging up their membranes and proteins for easy digestion by their neighbors. The process also takes place during development: we all have webbing between our digits in utero that's gone by birth, and millions of apparently healthy neurons die off to form the adult brain.
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Why are clouds white? [Madscience]
10
Jul
Price shocks waiting as US abandons helium business
05
Jul
Robert Richardson got a Nobel Prize for creating the first superfluid, a Bose-Einstein condensate comprised of chilled helium. But he started his talk at the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting by announcing that he'd be focusing purely on science policy—policy related to his work, given that the policy in question is the one that governs much of the world's stockpile of helium.
Because of how the US is privatizing its stock of the gas, prices are artificially low, which is encouraging a pattern of consumption that may leave us without significant supplies of the gas midway through the century.
Inert but interesting
Why is that significant? Richardson started by describing helium's more interesting properties, which are key to its commercial use. These include its chemistry—his slide led with the text, "helium has no chemistry; it is a mere placeholder between hydrogen and lithium on the periodic table." Being completely inert may seem rather dull, but for industries that work with highly reactive materials, this absence of chemistry can be essential.
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The hidden, invisible, and private web
05
Jul
Everyone knows that Google and the other search engines between them crawl, spider, and slurp up the whole internet, right? Wrong! The millions of websites that are obviously available on the internet are readily searchable, Google Bing, Yahoo, and their ilk have seen to that, we can usually find documents, pages, digital images, videos, music, and public scientific datasets at low cost, rapidly and accurately. But, that’s just the surface, there are countless resources that are simply inaccessible to search engine bots, not least emails, FTP sites, IRC, and IM.
Then there is the Invisible Web, something about which I first wrote way back in the mid-1990s. The Invisible Web is the term used to describe the contents of publicly accessible databases that are revealed on a per-user basis on demand and mostly off-limits to search engines, with a few exceptions.
Definitely off-limits to all public search engines and all members of the public for that matter are private databases, corporate and institutional sites that are locked behind firewalls, passwords, and protective scripts.
However, some owners of chunks of the private web might be amenable to letting trusted users access their private parts, it’s just that the users don’t know the private data is there and the owners don’t know who to trust. Now, Peter Mork and colleagues at the Mitre Corporation in McLean, Virginia, have come up with a way to bring the two parties together. They have developed a way to publicize the existence of private web resources that draws on various summarization strategies and demonstrates a way to create a database summary, which they call a digest, that then becomes part of the announcement. They have then looked at the trade-off between the data owners’ desires to minimize disclosure of sensitive information and the searchers’ desires to maximize the accuracy of their searches.
As an example of the kind of private web Mork and colleagues are alluding to. Imagine a specialist in the spread of flu during an epidemic hoping to trawl medical records to figure out how many people might become infected, these are strictly off-limits to the general public and to most researchers for that matter? Or, what about an economist hoping to spot trends in stock market dealings to help warn of another credit crunch well before it happens? Again private deals, are…private, so they will have no access to that information. On the other, anonymized data might be available to help the specialist find data sources relevant to current research. Similarly, summarized data can point the economist to data relevant to his inquiry. But, these data can only be utilized if they can be found.
Mork and colleagues’ digest approach allows data owners to publish less sensitive versions of their data so that searchers can determine with which data owners they should negotiate access. In this way, the private web maintains its privacy, while becoming a little more searchable, thereby allowing researchers to spend more time doing research and less time struggling to find data.
Peter Mork, Ken Smith, Barbara Blaustein, Christopher Wolf, Ken Samuel, Keri Sarver, & Irina Vayndiner (2010). Facilitating discovery on the private web using dataset digests International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 5 (3), 170-183
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The hidden, invisible, and private web is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog
How do we measure gravitational waves? [Mad Science]
03
Jul
Mathematician turns down $1 million prize
02
Jul
Brilliant and reclusive mathematician Grigory "Grisha" Perelman turned down yet another big prize for his breakthroughs. Of course, I only know they're breakthroughs because I read that they are. Math is hard. Anyway, this year, the Clay Mathematics Institute awarded Perelman its $1 million Millennium Prize. His "no thanks" wasn't a big surprise -- in 1996 he didn't show up to accept the hugely prestigious Fields Medal from the European Congress of Mathematics. At the time, he said, "I'm not interested in money or fame. I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I'm not a hero of mathematics. I'm not even that successful; that is why I don't want to have everybody looking at me." From the AP:
Russian mathematician rejects $1 million prize (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)The Interfax news agency quoted Perelman as saying he believed the (Millennium) prize was unfair. Perelman told Interfax he considered his contribution to solving the Poincare conjecture no greater than that of Columbia University mathematician Richard Hamilton.
"To put it short, the main reason is my disagreement with the organized mathematical community," Perelman, 43, told Interfax. "I don't like their decisions, I consider them unjust."