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Posts Tagged ‘Wired UK’

Stubbornness Increases the More People Tell You You’re Wrong

20 Sep

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK

A group of psychologists working at HP’s Social Computing Research Group has found that humans are more likely to change their minds when fewer, rather than more, people disagree with them.

The team conducted an experiment asking several hundred people to choose between two pieces of furniture. After a varying amount of time, they were asked to choose again between the items, but told that a certain number of other people had preferred the opposite item.

The results showed that a small amount of social pressure to reverse an opinion was far more effective in getting people to change their minds than if the pressure was much greater. When an overwhelming number of people were shown as having made a different choice, people tended to stick with their original selections.

There are two conflicting theories of social influence at work here. Psychological reactance theory says that when we’re exposed to opposition to our beliefs, our self-preservation instincts kick in to make us stick to them. Social influence and conformity theory, however, suggests that being socially connected with others is important to humans, and we’ll reverse an opinion if we feel like it’ll let us “belong” to a group — the “peer pressure” effect.

The psychologists believe that the first theory becomes more powerful when we’re confronted by the opinions of many others, but the latter kicks in when we’re in a smaller social group. That chimes with earlier work done by the same team that shows that votes on rankings are influenced by our desire to impact the choices of others. We like to have an influence.

The next step for the team is to bring quality into the equation. Is it volume of recommendations, or the source of those recommendations, that carries more influence? If 1,000 strangers recommend something, but four close friends differ, who would you side with?

The full research paper is available on HP’s website.

Image: HP

Source: Wired.co.uk

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Plutonium Is Hot Suspect in Pioneer Spacecraft Mystery

26 Jul

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK

A 30-year mystery as to why the Pioneer spacecraft have slowly been drifting off course is close to being explained — the latest analysis pins the blame on heat.

The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, launched in 1972 and 1973 respectively, were designed to fly past the asteroid belt and investigate the Jovian and Saturnian systems. Both are now located in the interstellar medium, and radio contact has been lost, but each is slowing gradually due to the influence of the sun’s gravity.

In 1980, an algorithm to study gravitational effects in the outer solar system was concocted by astronomer John Anderson, but it didn’t quite work. There was a discrepancy — small but noticeable — between the readings predicted by the algorithm and those actually observed from the Pioneer spacecrafts’ radio signal. The phenomenon was named the Pioneer Anomaly.

Physicists struggled to explain the discrepancy, proposing complex theories that even included a suggestion that gravity might behave differently at large distances from the Earth. However, the most recent analysis suggests a rather more mundane explanation — heat from the plutonium inside the spacecrafts’ generators.

If heat is radiating evenly in all directions from the spacecraft, then there will be no effect on its course, but if there’s a difference of as little as five percent between the front and the back then that could explain the difference between the predicted course and the course that’s actually been observed. The smoking gun is that the level of deceleration seems to be decreasing at an exponential rate, which tallies with the radioactive decay of the plutonium-238 that powers the two spacecraft.

It’s not completely out of the question that there might be another culprit, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely. NASA is performing its own investigation to compare to the data, but if that comes out with heat as the cause too, then the 30-year mystery may finally be over.

Image: NASA

Source: Wired.co.uk

Via: Discovery News

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Black Hole Holds Universe’s Biggest Water Supply

25 Jul

By Mark Brown, Wired UK

Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever found in the universe. It’s 12 billion light years away, and holds at least 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the Earth’s oceans combined.

It manifests itself as a colossal mass of water vapor, hidden in the distant APM 08279+5255 quasar. Quasars are bright and violent galactic nuclei fueled by a supermassive black hole at their center.

This quasar holds a black hole that’s 20 billion times more massive than the sun, and after gobbling down dust and gas it belches out as much energy as a thousand trillion suns. The water vapor is spread around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light years.

“The environment around this quasar is unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” says Matt Bradford from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release.

“It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,” adds Bradford in the release. As the light from this watery quasar took 12 billion years to reach Earth, the observations come from a time when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old.

The water reservoir was discovered by astronomers, led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology, and using the Z-Spec instrument at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA) in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.

Both instruments observe in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, which lie between infrared and microwave wavelengths. Over the last two to three decades, this technique has allowed astronomers to find trace gases, including water vapor, in the earliest universe.

Astronomers are now building a new telescope that specializes in these wavelengths. The proposed 25-meter telescope is called CCAT (Cornell Caltech Atacama Telescope) and would be plopped on the Cerro Chajnantor lava dome, more than 5,600 meters above sea level.

By measuring the presence of water and other important trace gases, it would allow cosmic researchers to hunt out primordial galaxies and more accurately study their composition. CCAT should start construction in 2013 and be completed in 2017.

Image: ESA/V. Beckmann (NASA-GSFC)

Source: Wired.co.uk

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Lost Rainbow Toad Found After 87 Years

14 Jul

By Mark Brown, Wired UK

Herpetologists at Conservation International have rediscovered the exotic Sambas stream toad (aka Borneo rainbow toad, aka Ansonia latidisca) after 87 years of evasion, and released the first ever photographs of the brightly colored amphibian.

The spindly-legged species was last seen in 1924 and European explorers in Borneo only made monochrome illustrations of it. A decade or so later, the CI and the SSC Amphibian Specialist Group added the species to its World’s Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Frogs campaign.

Indraneil Das of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak decided to hunt down the lost frog, and his team looked in the nearby area of Western Sarawak. In the summer of 2010 they made evening searches along the 1,329 meter high ridges of the Gunung Penrissen range to look for the toad.

After months of fruitless hunting, Das decided to include higher elevations in the team’s search. Then, one night, graduate student Pui Yong Min found the small toad two meters up a tree. Later they found another.

In the end the team had found three individuals of the missing toad species — an adult female, an adult male and a juvenile, ranging in size from 51 mm to 30 mm. All three toads exhibited those gangly limbs and the brightly colored patterns on their backs.

Talking about his team’s discovery in a press release, Das says, “They remind us that nature still holds precious secrets that we are still uncovering, which is why targeted protection and conservation is so important.”

Robin Moore of Conservation International agrees, saying in the release, “it is good to know that nature can surprise us when we are close to giving up hope, especially amidst our planet’s escalating extinction crisis.”

The slender-legged critter is only the second species on the “World’s Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Frogs” list to be found. In September 2010, the Rio Pescado Stubfoot Toad was rediscovered in Ecuador after 15 years of hiding. The spotty frog is sadly clinging on to survival.

The other frogs include the Costa Rican golden toad, the Australian gastric brooding frog, the Mesopotamia beaked toad from Colombia, Jackson’s climbing salamander, the African painted frog, the Venezuelan scarlet frog, the hula painted frog and the Turkestanian salamander — this hide and seek champion hasn’t been seen since 1909.

Image: Indraneil Das/Conservation International

Source: Wired.co.uk

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Triceratops Bones Support Asteroid Extinction Theory

13 Jul

By Mark Brown, Wired UK

Palaeontologists in America have discovered the youngest known dinosaur bones, after digging up the fossilized remains of a Triceratops or Torosaurus’ 45cm-long brow horn.

But what makes this find — from the Hell Creek Formation in the wastelands of south-east Montana — even more special is its ramifications for the current theories on what wiped out the prehistoric lizards.

It’s generally believed that a colossal asteroid pummeled into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula about 65 million years ago, which led to a mass extinction of any animal that couldn’t fly, swim or burrow into the ground.

But some skeptics believe that the dinosaurs were already on a sharp decline, or even extinct, when the asteroid hit. This would have been thanks to climate change, unpredictable sea levels and intense volcanic activity.

This dissenting theory has come to prominence because no fossils have even been found within three meters of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary — an area in the sedimentary rock that’s packed with rare elements like Iridium and Quartz, which signifies when the asteroid impacted the planet.

This newly discovered brow horn was found just 13cm below that all-important line. It proves that this Ceratopsian dinosaur (probably a Triceratops or Torosaurus) was wandering about right up to the impact event, and the authors believe this debunks the dissenting theory.

In the paper, published in Biology Letters, the team writes: “The in situ specimen demonstrates that a gap devoid of non-avian dinosaur fossils does not exist and is inconsistent with the hypothesis that non-avian dinosaurs were extinct prior to the K-T boundary impact event.”

Image: Daderot/Wikipedia

Source: Wired.co.uk

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Physicists: Universe Almost Certainly Not a Hologram

05 Jul

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK

An astrophysicist’s attempt to measure quantum “fuzziness” — to find out if we’re living in a hologram — has been headed off at the pass by results suggesting that we’re probably not.

In October 2010, Wired.com reported on Craig Hogan’s experiments with two of the world’s most precise clocks, which he was using to try and confirm the existence of Planck units — the smallest possible chunks of space, time, mass and other properties of the universe.

Hogan’s interpretation of results from the GEO600 gravitational wave experiment had shown a quantum fuzziness — a sort of pixelation — at incredibly small scales, suggesting that what was perceive as the universe might be projected from a two-dimensional shell at its edge.

However, a European satellite that should be able to measure these small scales hasn’t found any quantum fuzziness at all, contradicting the interpretation of the GEO600 results and indicating that the pixelation of spacetime, if it exists, is considerably smaller than predicted.

By examining the polarisation of gamma-ray bursts as they reach Earth, we should be able to detect this graininess, as the polarisation of the photons that arrive here is affected by the spacetime that they travel through. The grains should twist them, changing the direction in which they oscillate so that they arrive with the same polarization. Also, higher energy gamma rays should be twisted more than lower ones.

However, the satellite detected no such twisting — there were no differences in the polarization between different energies found to the accuracy limits of the data, which are 10,000 times better than any previous readings. That means that any quantum grains that exist would have to measure 10^-48 meters or smaller.

“This is a very important result in fundamental physics and will rule out some string theories and quantum loop gravity theories,” says Philippe Laurent, a physicist at France’s Atomic Energy Commission who analyzed the data, in a press release.

Source: Wired UK

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Image: Gamma ray burst. (ESA/SPI Team/ECF)

 
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Drill Close to Reaching 14-Million-Year-Old Antarctic Lake

07 Jan

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK

Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit.

The lake, which lies 2.5 miles below the icy surface of Antarctica, is unique in that it’s been completely isolated from the other 150 subglacial lakes on the continent for such a long time. It’s also oligotropic, meaning that it’s supersaturated with oxygen: Levels of the element are 50 times higher than those found in most typical freshwater lakes.

Since 1990, the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg in Russia has been drilling through the ice to reach the lake, but fears of contamination of the ecosystem in the lake have stopped the process multiple times, most notably in 1998 when the drills were turned off for almost eight years.

Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent’s environment, that it’s come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: “Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again.” The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.

The drill bit currently sits less than 328 feet above the lake. Once it reaches 65 to 98 feet, the mechanical drill bit will be replaced with a thermal lance that’s equipped with a camera.

Time is short, however. It’s possible that the drillers won’t be able to reach the water before the end of the current Antarctic summer, and they’ll need to wait another year before the process can continue.

When the sample can be recovered, however, it’s hoped that it’ll shed light on extremophiles — lifeforms that survive in extreme environments. Life in Lake Vostok would need adaptions to the oxygen-rich environment, which could include high concentrations of protective enzymes. The conditions in Lake Vostok are very similar to the conditions on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, so the new data could also strengthen the case for extraterrestrial life.

Finally, anything living in the lake will have evolved in relative isolation for about 14 million years, so it could offer a snapshot of conditions on Earth long before humans evolved.

Updated 5:12 pm ET.

Image: Antarctica, with location of Lake Vostok circled in red.
NASA/GSFC

Source: Wired.co.uk

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Duncan Geere is a senior staff writer at Wired.co.uk. He can be found on Twitter at @DuncanGeere. Follow Wired at @WiredUK

 
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Iceland Considers Humanoid Pylon Design to Carry Electricity

16 Aug

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK

An architecture and design firm called Choi+Shine has submitted a design for the Icelandic High-Voltage Electrical Pylon International Design Competition which proposes giant human-shaped pylons carrying electricity cables across the country’s landscape.

The enormous figures would only require slight alterations to existing pylon designs, says the firm, which was awarded an honorable mention for its design by the competition’s judging board. It also won an award from the Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture competition.

On their website, the architecture firm said: “Making only minor alterations to well-established steel-framed tower design, we have created a series of towers that are powerful, solemn and variable. These iconic pylon-figures will become monuments in the landscape. Seeing the pylon-figures will become an unforgettable experience, elevating the towers to something more than merely a functional design of necessity.”

The figures can be placed into different poses, with the suggestion that the landscapes could inform the position that the sculpture is placed into. For example, as a power line ascends a hill, the pylons could look as if they’re climbing. The figures could also stretch up to gain increased height over longer spans.

“Subtle alterations in the hands and head combined with repositioning of the main body parts in the x, y and z-axis, allow for a rich variety of expressions. The pylon-figures can be placed in pairs, walking in the same direction or opposite directions, glancing at each other as they pass by or kneeling respectively, head bowed at a town,” wrote the architects.

That doesn’t mean the manufacturing process has to be complex, however. Each pylon is made from the same basic bits (head, arms, torso, legs, etc.), which could be fabricated and then mounted into the desired position using pre-assembled joints.

Choi+Shine added: “Like the statues of Easter Island, it is envisioned that these 150-foot-tall modern caryatids will take on a quiet authority, belonging to their landscape yet serving the people, silently transporting electricity across all terrain, day and night, sunshine or snow.”

Images: Choi+Shine

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