A great tribute to DIY science: two Canadian teenagers designed a balloon with cameras that ascended into the fringes of the atmosphere, recording cool images and then plummeting back to Earth. That link has a great video summary.
Archive for the ‘science’ Category
Cloud quantum computing could be just as secure
23 January 2012Cloud computing is using (possibly renting) computing power elsewhere via the internet.
Quantum computing is using the seemingly-odd behaviour of quantum mechanics to do computations in parallel, thereby multiplying computing speeds.
Some dudes have written a paper about research they’re doing into whether quantum computers could do calculations in the cloud securely.
That is pretty seriously cool.
The Best of Starts With A Bang: Top 10 for 2011
31 December 2011Starts With a Bang is my favourite science blog. Ethan does a great job of spelling out, in (literally) graphic detail, all sorts of difficult but fundamental topics. He’s very prolific and funny, too.
Here are his top 10 science stories of the year, as described on his blog:
- We Think Our Universe is Just One Tiny Bit of a Multiverse.
- How the Entire Universe Could Have Come From Nothing, to Give Us Everything!
- The First Atoms ever Formed in the Universe: Found, Direct from the Big Bang!
- The James Webb Space Telescope: Saved from the Brink of Termination.
- The Smallest Mini-Galaxy in the Universe: its Discovery and its Dark Matter.
- Why Claims of Cold Fusion Don’t Stand Up to Science.
- The Closest Supernova to us in a Generation.
- The Saga of Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos: Are They Real?
- The First Earth-like Exoplanets: Habitability and Size-wise.
- The Large Hadron Collider’s First Evidence for the Higgs.
NASA gives nod to first private spaceflight to ISS
12 December 2011A private U.S. company will attempt the first-ever commercial cargo run to the International Space Station next year.
NASA announced the news Friday, one year and one day after Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, became the first private business to launch a capsule into orbit and return it safely to Earth.
On Feb. 7, SpaceX will attempt another orbital flight from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. This time, the unmanned Dragon capsule will fly to the space station and dock with a load of supplies.
Quantum locking makes for a cool levitation video
23 October 2011Check this out. This is not a special effect. This is a quantum effect, made possible by magnetic flux tubes through imperfections in a very thin superconducting film. Be astonished, then read about it here.
Robots invent their own language
20 September 2011I found this on Discover’s website: an Australian researcher has taught robots to make new words for new places they discover, and share those new words with other robots. That’s so neat.
[Research team leader] Wiles outfitted each Lingodroid with an alphabet of beeps that correspond to letters. Then she programmed them to play a series of games in which they paired the letters into nonsensical combinations like “ja” or “ku” and joined those syllables to coin neologisms as needed. For example, in one game two robots roamed through a course and met in an unfamiliar part of it. The meeting triggered one robot to name the spot “jaya” and share the new word with its partner, who then added the word to its lexicon. In this way the robots slowly built a new language to describe their travels [pdf] and eventually even learned to communicate and understand directions.
Richard Hammond’s Engineering Connections
12 September 2011I was never a gearhead, nor was I a toff, so I never watched Top Gear that much.
I am an engineer, though, so when I saw a show called Engineering Connections on SBS I tuned in, even though it was prefaced as being presented by Top Gear‘s Richard Hammond.
It turned out to be just my sort of show. Hammond walks the viewers through the engineering challenges behind some of the biggest construction and design challenges in the world, including the Airbus A380, the Sydney Opera House, the Bilbao Guggenheim, super tankers, the Space Shuttle, and Japanese bullet trains.
The program’s focus is explaining how engineers overcame these challenges, though. Hammond describes the sources of inspiration – either in nature, or in simpler devices – for how these design problems were solved. These are the engineering connections.
He then proceeds – in his gee-whiz way – to construct examples, with the help of experts, that illustrate how these inspiring engineering connections work. For example, the show I caught last night was about the Opera House. They explained that the arched concrete blocks of the structure’s sails were strengthened using the same principles as one of those collapsing pop-up toys, and then showed how they could make a very strong arch out of styrofoam using the same principle of post-tension.
This show explains what engineering is about: the practical application of science, and re-using established ideas in new contexts. They do it in very simple ways that anyone can get. Hammond isn’t too annoying. I think it’s a great science show.
There have been three series. They were originally made for the National Geographic channel in the UK, but have also been shown on BBC2 and – here in Oz – on SBS.
Humpback whales catch fish by blowing bubbles
10 September 2011I’ve seen TV nature programs before that showed this behaviour by humpback whales: by blowing a curtain of bubbles around a school of fish, they can trap and catch and eat them.
The video below shows new data captured by American scientists who were able to slap data collection units on whales. They’ve been able to see the movements of the whales below the surface, how they make these bubble traps, and how there seem to be different kinds.
I found this video at LifeLines, a Scienceblogs blog that features podcasts of the American Physiological Society.
Google goes maths crazy
17 August 2011Google seem to be cementing their “mad genius” status. Not content with seizing control (i.e., buying Motorola mobile and therefore obtaining 30% of the North American Android market they kicked off) they seem fixated on mathematics.
Last month they bid the digits of pi in the auction for Nortel’s patents.
Now today the Google search page doodle image is an homage to Fermat’s Last Theorem (it’s the anniversary of Fermat’s birthday).
I can hear cackling behind those castle walls, I tell you.
Why I Love Science: Arithmetic at the maple house
12 July 2011As a kid I worked the retail counter at my parents’ maple syrup business (very Canadian, I know). We’d total up people’s sweet purchases, take their money, and make change for them.
Customer after customer, and I eventually got accustomed to doing this arithmetic in my head. I came to recognise how those numeric gymnastics represented stuff that happened in the real world; that they were a language that described things (like a litre of maple syrup) and processes (like summing amounts for a total purchase). Math became visual in my head.
That visualisation only increased when I started playing around with the calculators we used for those retail transactions. I found the squaring function especially mesmerising. Square 2 and you get 4. Square 4 and you get 16. Small potatoes. But square 16 and suddenly you’re off: 256. Square 256 and you’ve got a number that’s suddenly out of the range of a kid’s conception: 65,536. From there the numbers got so big so fast it made my head spin.
Those transactions at the maple counter were how I came to love numbers and mathematics.
Why I Love Science: Animals
10 July 2011A while ago I wrote a series of posts on the music that was, in my youth, formative for my eventual tastes. I’m now going to write some blog entries on the stuff that made me love science.
One of the first thing that made me think about science was a huge, tome-like book of animals that lived on my parents’ bookshelf when I was young. I don’t recall what it was called, or who published it (I suspect it might have been National Geographic). It might even still be there when I visit my family next week.
It was magical to me. It was big, thick and heavy. It had a little bit about extinct animals and the geological life of the earth. But mostly it was just about the many groups of animals that existed on the planet today.
There were all sorts of high-quality photographs of leopards and whales and snakes and voles and eagles and spiders and much more. It was presented fairly rigorously, often with latin names for the animals and descriptions of species, orders and and phyla. It was big, and felt exhaustive. I spent years looking at all the exotic animals within in, amazed at the range of life and at the diversity of species.
That big animal book, whatever it was, was incredibly important in forming my fascination with the living natural world.
Click to embiggen
Semisolid Flow Cell: New designs for batteries
26 June 2011Current electrical battery design uses the same cell for storage and discharge of electricity. A new design from MIT, however, separates the two mechanisms and stands to become cheaper and much more efficient. Look out, internal combustion.
A radically new approach to the design of batteries, developed by researchers at MIT, could provide a lightweight and inexpensive alternative to existing batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. The technology could even make “refueling” such batteries as quick and easy as pumping gas into a conventional car.
The new battery relies on an innovative architecture called a semi-solid flow cell, in which solid particles are suspended in a carrier liquid and pumped through the system.
Flow batteries have existed for some time, but have used liquids with very low energy density (the amount of energy that can be stored in a given volume).
The new semi-solid flow batteries pioneered by Chiang and colleagues overcome this limitation, providing a 10-fold improvement in energy density over present liquid flow-batteries, and lower-cost manufacturing than conventional lithium-ion batteries.
Okay, maybe not as sexy-lookin' as a V8
Can Brain Scans Predict Music Sales?
13 June 2011From an article in Science, one study indicates that the reactions of teenage music listener’s brains may be better at predicting what songs will be a hit than by simply asking them which they like best.
Two years ago, Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta, was on the couch with his kids watching American Idol. One of the contestants sang the melancholy hit song “Apologize” by the alternative rock band OneRepublic, and something clicked in Berns’s mind.
He’d used the song a few years earlier in a study on the neural mechanisms of peer pressure, in this case, how teenagers’ perceptions of a song’s popularity influence how they rate the song themselves. At the time, OneRepublic had yet to sign its first record deal. A student in Bern’s lab had pulled a clip of “Apologize” from the band’s MySpace page to use in the study. When Berns heard the song on American Idol, he wondered whether anything in the brain scan data his team had collected could have predicted it would become a hit.
To find out what had become of the [120 random unsigned songs they picked for their study two years before], the lab bought a subscription to Nielsen SoundScan, a service that tracks music sales.
Intriguingly, the brain scan data predicted commercial success better than the subjects’ likeability ratings, which did not correlate with sales. “What is new and interesting about this study is that brain signals predict sales in a situation where the ratings of the participants don’t.”
Shock wave from trombone filmed
29 May 2011I used to play the trombone, so I’m tickled by this report: an acoustic shock wave has, for the first time, been filmed emanating from a trombone. It’s not super-visible; you might need to watch fullscreen to see it.
Also, a warning: this will only be interesting to vibration nerds (and, possibly, trombonists). The rest of you will be underwhelmed.
It’s the long tubes in the slide of the trombone that allow this sort of shock wave to form. Other wind instruments, like tubas, have longer wind pathways, but they curl around more.
Scientists to sail robot boat on methane lake of Saturn’s moon Titan
15 May 2011From the Guardian:
Space engineers are planning to build the first extraterrestrial boat. They want to launch the craft towards Titan – Saturn’s largest moon – and parachute it on to the Ligeia Mare, a sea of methane and ethane on its surface.The robot ship would sail around this extraterrestrial sea for several months, exploring its coastline and measuring the winds and waves that sweep its surface.
Teaching physics
11 May 2011Once again, Randall nails it. At least, for the science nerds. HAW!
Click to view embiggened original
Pollination
10 May 2011I spotted this blog entry about some beautiful images of pollination captured on film (Punctuated Equilibrium is always a great science read).
The video of bees, bats, butterflies and other pollinating animals has some great, hidden moments from one of nature’s systems of reproduction.
Climategate: What Really Happened?
9 May 2011American public opinion on man-made climate change swung wildly in 2008 due to a fiasco known as “Climategate”. MotherJones writes an excellent article about how it was allowed to happen.
The trigger was the release of internal emails from the East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). They showed discussions between climate scientists who were frustrated at being abused and threatened; who were tired of lies; who wanted to fight back and make the public aware of the facts around the up-tick in carbon emissions. Industry seized on those discussions as admissions of doubt and duplicity. The result?
In November 2008, 71 percent of [US] respondents agreed that the planet is warming. Five weeks after Climategate, only 57 percent believed it.
In September 2009, RealClimate, a blog launched by Mann and other scientists to fight back against skeptics, weighed in. Several of the blog’s contributors drafted a public statement about what they saw as a pattern: “An unverified accusation of malfeasance is made based on nothing, and it is instantly ‘telegraphed’ across the denial-o-sphere while being embellished along the way to apply to…any and all scientists, even those not even tangentially related. The usual suspects become hysterical with glee that finally the ‘hoax’ has been revealed and congratulations are handed out all round…Net effect on lay people? Confusion. Net effect on science? Zip.”
A year and a half later, the question of who stole the emails and released them has never been answered. Mosher and other climate skeptics maintain that it was likely an inside job, carried out by someone at the University of East Anglia who wanted problematic science exposed. The CRU, on the other hand, maintains that it was the work of someone outside of the university—a “very professional job,” says Trevor Davies, pro-vice chancellor for research at East Anglia and the former head of the CRU.
So did the scientists do something more diabolical than gripe about critics and fret over how their research would be interpreted? Not according to seven separate inquiries on the subject, each of which found that the researchers’ work was not in question—though several concluded that their behavior was.
But none of the exonerations mattered: The scientists had lost control of the narrative.
Contagious yawning in chimps may depend on social groups
28 April 2011Most people are familiar with the story: if you see someone yawn, it makes you yawn. A twist on this can be found in a new The Thoughtful Animal ScienceBlog entry, though.
Scientists aren’t at all sure why this contagious yawning happens. In fact, the data’s insufficiently strong for everyone to agree that it does happen. But there is some evidence that “empathic yawning” does happen in five animals, all mammals: four primates (including humans) and domestic dogs.
For us, and for dogs, the evidence – such as it is – is that observing anyone else yawning can make us yawn.
But new studies show that for one of the empathic yawning primates – chimpanzees – they do so significantly more if it’s a member of their own social group that makes the triggering yawn. They yawn in response much less if the first yawn is from a chimp that belongs to another group.
There’s speculation that this might be because humans and dogs have evolved in ways that mean it’s an advantage for us to feel empathy for individuals that aren’t part of our group.
There’s some good discussion about the parts of the brain that are triggered in empathic responses. Check out the blog.
