I 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.
American 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.
Most 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.
Terje Sorgjerd makes beautiful time-lapse videos.
This one, which is making the rounds of science blogs, captures not only stunning views of the Milky Way but also El Teide, the highest mountain in Spain.
From the BBC: the European Space Agency has selected four new mission concepts to compete for a launch opportunity at the start of the 2020s.
- Large Observatory For X-ray Timing (LOFT): The mission would go after the fast-moving, high-energy environments that surround black holes, neutron stars and pulsars – objects that can produce sudden and very rapid bursts of X-rays. By observing this emission, scientists would hope to address questions related to fundamental physics: they could probe the effects of matter entering ultra-strong gravitational fields and ultra-dense states. They could also measure more accurately the mass and spin of black holes; and in the case of the biggest such objects in the Universe, this has something interesting to say about how they, and the galaxies that host them, formed.
- Space-Time Explorer and Quantum Equivalence Principle Space Test (STE-Quest): Again, this mission would address some big physics topics. One objective would be to test “the equivalence principle”, which underpins several fundamental assumptions including the idea that gravity will accelerate all objects in a vacuum equally regardless of their masses or the materials from which they are made. The Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott famously demonstrated this principle when he dropped a hammer and feather on the Moon in 1971 and both hit the surface at the same time. STE-Quest would put very sensitive instrumentation on an orbiting to do a far more precise test of whether gravity really is so blind or perhaps varies on some scales.
- MarcoPolo-R: This is an idea that has been around for a while. The mission would attempt to return a sample of material from an asteroid for detailed analysis in Earth laboratories. The most primitive asteroids contain geochemistry not observable in Earth rocks because they are constantly recycled. As such, asteroids can tell scientists a lot about conditions in the early Solar System, and about the original “stuff” that went into making the planets billions of years ago. One potential target is actually two asteroids in close proximity – a binary known as (175706) 1996FG3. The larger rock is about 1.5km across; its companion is less than half a km in diameter.
- Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory (ECHO): This is a 1.2m telescope that would study planets circling far-away stars. In recent years, hundreds of these so-called exoplanets have been detected, but we no precious little about them yet. Echo would observe the planets as they moved in front of their stars. From the way the light is attenuated, the telescope’s detectors would be able to probe the atmospheres of these worlds. Echo would look for the presence of molecules such as ozone and carbon dioxide in the atmospheres. These and other markers might tell us something about whether any of the exoplanets have conditions capable of supporting life.
From the excellent science blog Punctuated Equilibrium, a piece about MIT Media Lab’s Cynthia Breazeal and her absolute love for robots.
Cynthia Breazeal fell in love with robots after seeing Star Wars when she was a kid. As a grad student, she wondered why we were using robots on Mars, but not in our living rooms. The key, she realized: training robots to interact with people. Now she dreams up and builds robots that teach, learn — and play. This video shows a little of what she’s doing:
The International Space Station becomes a little more international this year. After the last two shuttle missions – the final one takes place in June – it won’t be NASA taking people and stuff back and forth anymore.
I have a personal connection to the ISS. I was the lead engineer for the environmental testing of the robot arm joints. I think it’s been underrated. Could it have been done better, cheaper? Sure. Has it produced sexy results like the Hubble? No. But I believe it’s produced a lot of low-level, useful, unglamorous information about how to build and live in space. And many, many experiments have been conducted aboard it. It’s been a stepping stone, and one that may not be so expensive at all in the long run.
I think this commenter has got it right.
From ScienceDaily:
What sounds like science fiction is actually possible: thanks to magnetic stimulation, the activity of certain brain nerve cells can be deliberately influenced. What happens in the brain in this context has been unclear up to now. Medical experts from Bochum University have now shown that various stimulus patterns changed the activity of distinct neuronal cell types. In addition, certain stimulus patterns led to rats learning more easily. The knowledge obtained could contribute to cerebral stimulation being used more purposefully in future to treat functional disorders of the brain.
Transhuman condition, here we come.
It’s cool space news time over at the BBC:
Astronomers have released the largest ever colour image of the whole sky, stitched from seven million images, each made of 125 million pixels.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has helped to identify hundreds of millions of cosmic objects. Researchers have also released an animation on YouTube demonstrating how the incredibly high-resolution image is represented on the celestial sphere.
The folks at The Thinking Atheist have collected the ten most-encountered creationist arguments and countered them via their YouTube channel. Fun.
The UK’s scientific body, The Royal Society, has been celebrating 350 years of existence. They’re concluding that celebratory anniversary with this web page that links to articles examining how science might answer some of the big questions facing us. Good reading.
Bedside tables are simple to put together. Why should Large Hadron Colliders be any different?
Thanks to Dino for sending this.
Urinary tract infections are a major problem for women. Millions of women have to visit the doctor each year for antibiotics to treat these infections. And, as often happens with living, evolving organisms like bacteria, doctors are seeing strains of infection that are becoming resistant to the common antibiotics.
More than 80% of urinary tract infections come from E. coli bacteria. If there were a vaccine that could prevent women from getting these infections it would be a massive health and cost benefit. So of course researchers are looking for a vaccine.
The hunt for vaccines almost always takes place in lab animals first. Researchers at the University of Michigan found last year that a vaccine they tried on mice – and that made them immune to urinary tract infections – seemed, initially, to act the same way in human cell samples. This raised a great deal of hope for a human vaccine.
Further studies the U of M group has done this year, however, show that there are differences in the appearance of how E. coli develop in humans and mice, and therefore differences in how they can be affected by a vaccine.
This isn’t entirely bad news. It does provide a further key that the researchers need to look for differences. It’s a further piece of the puzzle. It tells us that there won’t be a shortcut by using the mouse vaccine, but it also gives us a clue for how to keep looking. This is the way that science works.
There’s a mathematical optimisation problem called the Travelling Salesman problem. The problem is: if a salesman has to visit several cities, what’s the shortest route he can take to visit them all? There are numerical methods to solve these sorts of problems, and they can take a long time, even with computers.
Researchers at the University of London have found that bees learn to solve these problems pretty quickly, though. They do so as they visit flowers, figuring out the optimum routes between them, despite having only tiny little brains. Maybe those brains have evolved this one really useful (for them) capability.
MIT’s Media Lab contains all sorts of wacky forward-looking inventing engineers. Watch the vid below and read the article from the BBC to learn more about powered foot prostheses, automatic snack-makers, Guitar Hero, hand gesture controls, and more future-looking things.
There’s a short ad at the front of the embedded video.
From engineering.com, here’s This Week In Engineering. Learn about beer for astronauts and Italian robot mafiosos.
These guys will be at the expo for the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, DC, on October 23 and 24.
Good video from the Guardian and Brian Cox about how the Large Hadron Collider experiments may help us understand why some elementary particles have mass and others don’t.
ScienceDaily reports that researchers have developed gel devices that – similarly to leaves – can convert solar energy into electrical energy.
A team led by a North Carolina State University researcher has shown that water-gel-based solar devices — “artificial leaves” — can act like solar cells to produce electricity. The findings prove the concept for making solar cells that more closely mimic nature. They also have the potential to be less expensive and more environmentally friendly than the current standard-bearer: silicon-based solar cells.
This could be a better (or at least additional) way of producing energy from sunlight than current photovoltaic cells. The important thing is that research like this continues.
The other day I blogged – on my other blog – about reading the book, Foucault’s Pendulum.
If you’d like to read a really good explanation about what Foucault’s Pendulums (is that the right plural?) are, or how they help us confirm that the Earth is rotating on its axis, check out ScienceBlogs’ Starts With A Bang.
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