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Posts Tagged ‘Science’

Six science selections

16 Mar
  • How Radiation Threatens Health – Why and how does exposure to radiation make you ill? What levels of exposure are dangerous and what levels are lethal?
  • Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power – Quake + tsunami = 1 minor radiation dose so far, says El Reg. Tragic as recent events in Japan have been. We should be building more nuclear reactors not fewer. Global warming caused by burning more and more fossil fuel in coming decades will have a far more detrimental effect on many more people than minor nuclear leaks.
  • Dog walking ‘is good exercise’ – Owning a dog but not walking it is bad for the dog’s owner as well as the dog. NHS Choices unravels the spin on recent headlines proclaiming dog ownership good for health.
  • Top banana – Atomic absorption spectroscopy is being used to assess how well banana peel can filter heavy metals, such as copper, from waste water. Preliminary results look promising and could lead to an ecologically sound method of industrial cleanup that uses a renewable but otherwise wasted source material.
  • spectroscopynow.com/coi/cda/detail.cda?id=25080&type=Feature&chId=9&page=1″>Toxic robot – A new high-speed robotic screening system for chemical toxicity testing was recently unveiled by collaborating US federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health. The system will screen some 10,000 different chemicals for putative toxicity in what represents the first phase of the "Tox21" program aimed at protecting human health and improving chemical testing.
  • Crystal unknowns – Frank Leusen and his co-workers at the University of Bradford, England, have turned to a quantum mechanical approach to help them predict the three known possible polymorphic structures of a sulfonimide. The work could assist crystallographers in structure determination of unknowns

My latest selection of six science stories, picked up by David Bradley Science Writer @sciencebase.

Six science selections is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

 
 

LIGO to Collaboration Members: There Is No Santa Claus

15 Mar

Ah, the life of an experimental physicist. Long hours of mind-bending labor, all in service of those few precious moments in which you glimpse one of Nature’s true secrets for the very first time. Followed by the moment when your bosses tell you it was all just a trick.

Not that you didn’t see it coming. As we know, the LIGO experiment and its friend the Virgo experiment are hot on the trail of gravitational waves. They haven’t found any yet, but given the current sensitivity, that’s not too much of a surprise. Advanced LIGO is moving forward, and when that is up and running the situation is expected to change.

But who knows? We could be surprised. It’s certainly necessary to comb through the data looking for signals, even if they’re not expected at this level of sensitivity.

Of course, there is something of a bias at work: scientists are human beings, and they want to find a signal, no matter how sincerely they may rhapsodize about the satisfaction of a solid null result. (Do the words “life on a meteorite” mean anything to you?) So, to keep themselves honest and make sure the data-analysis pipeline is working correctly, the LIGO collaboration does something sneaky: they inject false signals into the data. This is done by a select committee of higher-ups; the people actually analyzing the data don’t know whether a purported signal they identify is real, or fake. It’s their job to analyze things carefully and carry the whole process through, right up to the point where you have written a paper about your results. Only then is the truth revealed.

Yesterday kicked off the LIGO-Virgo collaboration meeting here in sunny Southern California. I had been hearing rumors that LIGO had found something, although everyone knew perfectly well that it might be fake — that doesn’t prevent the excitement from building up. Papers were ready to be submitted, and the supposed event even had a colorful name — “Big Dog.” (The source was located in Canis Major, if you must know.)

Steinn Sigurðsson broke the news, and there’s a great detailed post by Amber Stuver, a member of the collaboration. And the answer is: it was fake. Just a drill, folks, nothing to see here. That’s science for you.

When the real thing comes along, they’ll be ready. Can’t wait.

 
 

Smelling bad actually makes you look uglier [Psychology]

06 Mar
Relative to pretty much any other mammal, humans have an absolutely atrocious sense of smell. But even our weakest sense is powerful enough to affect how we think...starting, of course, with how attractive other people look. More »
 
 

How did humans really evolve? [Io9 Backgrounder]

04 Mar
Almost two million years ago, a band of brave explorers left their families behind in their warm, tropical home and sought refuge in northern lands. Armed with sharp stone tools and their wits, they followed the coast as far north as they could, then began to veer east, settling on the sunny, fertile shores of an inland sea that today we call the Mediterranean. Their children spread further north and east, and a million years later they had established settlements along the coasts of today's Europe, England, and China. More »
 
 

Research proves online gaming at work is good for you – and for your boss [Mad Science]

04 Mar
Are you in danger of getting fired because of too much gaming at work? If so, here's a scientific study you need to know about (and perhaps slip into the "to-read" pile on your boss's desk): "Games at work: the recreational use of computer games during working hours." More »
 
 

A drug that can make your old memories like new [Mad Science]

04 Mar
There are drugs that help you remember what you learn, and ones that erase your memory. But until now, there have no substances with the power to enhance and strengthen old memories hovering on the brink of being forgotten. Now a group of neuroscientsts say they've isolated a single enzyme in the brain that can help long-term memories remain crisp in your mind. More »
 
 

Our galaxy is home to more than 50 billion planets…and 500 million potentially habitable ones [Astronomy]

20 Feb
The Kepler telescope discovered more than 1,200 planets in just one tiny corner of the Milky Way. Crunching the numbers, a conservative estimate says there should be at least fifty billion planets in the entire galaxy, and about 500 million of those should be inside the habitable zone. But how many of those planets have life on them, let alone other intelligent beings? That's the question we still can't answer...but we're getting closer. More »
 
 

All the world’s computers equal to one human mind

16 Feb

The time may come when a computer will be able to out-compute a human, but not yet. According to a recent study, adding up all the computation power in every laptop, server, mainframe, cell phone, and digital processors of all kinds, everywhere on the planet will give you approximately the ability to handle approximately 6.4 x 10^18 operations a second. About the same as a human brain.

All the worlds storage – paper, film, hard-drives, etc. would give you same amount of storage as human DNA. In other words, somewhere around 2011 the planet has enough computing power to account for 1 extra person. The vast amount of “thinking” is still done by organic chemistry. Read the article I read on ARS Technica.

 
 

The truth about why things smell bad: Vibrating molecules [Biology]

15 Feb
For over a century, our sense of smell has been explained with the "lock and key" hypothesis, which holds that each odor molecule has a particular shape that allows it to fit into particular smell receptors in the nose. But now a controversial study involving fruit flies suggests that hypothesis might miss the truth entirely - the secret, they say, is all in the vibrations. More »
 
 

Solar-powered hornet is the Superman of the animal kingdom [Mad Biology]

13 Feb
Plants use photosynthesis to turn sunlight into energy every single day. This ability appeared to be completely unknown in the animal kingdom, leaving the living solar battery that is Superman as the only animal to ever harness the sun's rays for power. But now we've discovered that a type of hornet is doing its own homegrown photosynthesis, absorbing sunlight and turning it into useful energy. It's the first animal we've ever discovered that possesses this ability...and we might be able to harness our own version of it for alternative energy. More »