Congresso Comunicação Ciência SciCom Pt 2015, Lagos (Portugal) | Congress SciCom Pt 2015. Origin of Mysterious Portuguese Mathematical and Geographical Tiles Revealed | The Artful Amoeba, Scientific American Blog Network. The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. A few months ago I wrote about some mystifying mathematical and geographic tiles I encountered at the National Tile Museum in Lisbon, Portugal. Their accompanying label gave no clue to who had made them or why. Several readers subsequently wrote to tell me what they knew about these tiles. Thank you to everyone who did so! I will be sharing in particular the explanation provided to me by Carlota Simões from the Science Museum of the Coimbra University in Coimbra, Portugal, and also drawing on a paper about the tiles published just this year that she cited.
When the tiles were first brought to public attention in a newspaper in 1982, no one knew where they might have come from. The story begins with the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order who have become known over the centuries for their work in education and science (among many, many other things). The Marquis de Pombal (remember him?) Bruce Lewenstein (Univ. de Cornell) e a Comunicação de Ciência (2) | 9 Jul 2014 by Ciencia_Viva_Conversa. Bruce Lewenstein (Univ. de Cornell) e a Comunicação de Ciência (1) | 2 Jul 2014 by Ciencia_Viva_Conversa. Untitled. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian - Agenda. SUJEITO A INSCRIÇÃO PRÉVIA .Para mais informações contatar: Catarina Rodrigues (ERC) conferencia@erc.pt nfo@erc.pt PROGRAMA 9:30 - Abertura e Boas vindas Carlos Magno , Presidente da Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social Jonathan Howard , Diretor do Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência Miguel Seabra , Presidente da Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia 9:45 - Comunicar Ciência Orador: Martin Bauer , Professor na London School of Economics; Membro do “Public Communication of Science and Technology Committee” e editor da revista “Public Understanding of Science” Moderação: Ana Godinho , Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência/Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia Debate 11:00 - Pausa para café 11:15 - Ciência nos telejornais de horário nobre Apresentação do estudo: Tânia de Morais Soares , Departamento de Análise de Media (ERC) Apresentação de resultados: Alexandra Figueiredo e Filipa Menezes (ERC) Sílvia Castro (IGC/Programa MIT Portugal) Moderação Dulce Salzedas , Jornalista, SIC.
The Shorty Awards - Honoring the best of Twitter and social media. Why Smokers Are Skinny. Scientists Create Tiny Artificial Brain That Exhibits 12 Seconds of Short Term Memory. It's not artificial intelligence in the Turing test sense, but the technicolor ring you see above is actually an artificial microbrain, derived from rat brain cells--just 40 to 60 neurons in total--that is capable of about 12 seconds of short-term memory. Developed by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, the brain was created in an attempt to artificially nurture a working brain into existence so that researchers could study neural networks and how our brains transmit electrical signals and store data so efficiently.
The did so by attaching a layer of proteins to a silicon disk and adding brain cells from embryonic rats that attached themselves to the proteins and grew to connect with one another in the ring seen above. But as if the growing of a tiny, functioning, donut-shaped brain in a petri dish wasn't enough, the team found that when they stimulate the neurons with electricity, the pulse would circulate the microbrain for a full 12 seconds.
That's essentially short-term memory. ‘Lefties’ more gifted ‘a myth’ The study confirms that left-handed children will do worse than their right-handed siblings. Image: kickers/iStockphoto Left-handed people consistently perform worse than right-handed people in measures of cognitive ability, or IQ, with the ‘level of disability’ equivalent to being prematurely born. This is the finding of a recent study led by Professor Mike Nicholls (pictured), newly-appointed Director of the Brain and Cognition Laboratory in Flinders University’s School of Psychology, which dispels the common myth that left-handed people are more likely to be gifted. “The evidence, based on our analyses of very large databases of handedness and other attributes in people across Australia, the UK and the USA, doesn’t bear out that myth,” Professor Nicholls said.
“Our study of members of the same family confirms that left-handed children will do worse than their right-handed siblings,” he said. He joined Flinders in January after 17 years at the University of Melbourne. Jupiter steals Mars mass and populates asteroid belt - National Paelenotology Science News. A paper in the June 5, 2011, journal Nature presents a simulation that explains the small size of Mars relative to the Earth and Venus and the composition of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
According to the simulation, Jupiter moved toward Mars due to gravitational pull of a dense planet on a newly formed gaseous planet. When Jupiter solidified, it pulled mass away from Mars by the gravitational influence of Saturn when it formed. This produced the present location of Jupiter that is ouside the asteroid belt. The two different types of asteroids – dry and watery – that exist in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is explained by this simulation.
Either water bearing bits and pieces of Jupiter in formation or water bearing bits taken from Mars were left in the asteroid belt as a result of Jupiter’s movement through the asteroid belt on its path to the position it has in the solar system today. The research is the work of Dr. Don't Believe Facebook; You Only Have 150 Friends. According to "Dunbar's Number," human beings can maintain a network of only about 150 close friends. Istockphoto.com hide caption itoggle caption istockphoto.com According to "Dunbar's Number," human beings can maintain a network of only about 150 close friends. istockphoto.com GORE-TEX, the company that makes wetsuits, hiking boots and ponchos, is the subject of a famous anecdote in the world of sociology. "When Bill Gore set the company up, he set it up in his backyard," Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, tells NPR's Rachel Martin. From its modest beginnings, GORE-TEX grew and grew, Dunbar says, until Gore opened up a large factory.
Then one day, Dunbar says, Gore walked into his factory. "And he simply didn't know who everybody was. " Gore wondered why this was. Gore did some counting, and realized that after putting about 150 people in the same building, things at GORE-TEX just did not run smoothly. Business was never better. Italian Seismologists Charged With Manslaughter for Not Predicting 2009 Quake - FoxNews.com. April 6, 2009: An aerial photo provided by the Italian Police shows the debris of a collapsed building in an area near L'Aquila, central Italy, after a powerful earthquake shook central Italy.AP Photo/Italian Police Italian government officials have accused the country's top seismologist of manslaughter, after failing to predict a natural disaster that struck Italy in 2009, a massive devastating earthquake that killed 308 people. A shocked spokesman for the U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS) likened the accusations to a witch hunt. "It has a medieval flavor to it -- like witches are being put on trial," the stunned spokesman told FoxNews.com. Enzo Boschi, the president of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), will face trial along with six other scientists and technicians, after failing to predict the future and the impending disaster. Earthquakes are, of course, nearly impossible to predict, seismologists say. In addition to Boschi, those facing trial are: US scientists get glimpse of antihelium | Science. They were gone as soon as they appeared, but for a fleeting moment they were the heaviest particles of antimatter a laboratory has seen. Scientists in the US produced a clutch of antihelium particles, the antimatter equivalents of the helium nucleus, after smashing gold ions together nearly 1bn times at close to the speed of light.
The discovery of antihelium at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven national laboratory in New York will aid the search for exotic phenomena in the distant universe, including antimatter versions of stars and even galaxies. Antimatter looks and behaves like normal matter but has one crucial difference: particles of antimatter have an equal and opposite charge to those that make up the world around us.
When antimatter meets matter, the two annihilate one another, leaving nothing but a burst of energy. "Antihelium is stable, so if it doesn't encounter anything it will survive forever," said Aihong Tang, a physicist at the laboratory. Toutes les tailles | Darwin Discovery Days Salem-Keizer Science Expo. Darwin Discovery Days Salem-Keizer Science Expo. The Hacker War Over WikiLeaks Rages On | 80beats. Today WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, wanted in connection with sex-related charges in Sweden, turned himself in to the police in London.
And while Assange’s personal troubles escalate, so does the online war over WikiLeaks. Last week came the cyber attack against WikiLeaks.org, which hacker “Jester” claimed to have organized. On his blog, Jester describes himself as a”hacktivist for good” and someone who is “obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys.”
[Los Angeles Times] That disrupted the site’s operation and left WikiLeaks scrambling. But this week the tide of hacking has turned: Hackers operating under the names Operation Payback or Anonymous are targeting sites that have withdrawn support from WikiLeaks during the current controversy. Noa Bar Yossef, senior security strategist for Imperva, commented via e-mail to say, “Operation Payback’s goal is not hacking for profit. EU to invest 6.4 billion in research.
BRUSSELS - Research organisations, universities and industry, will receive a sum of €6.4 billion next year in the European Commission's largest ever allocation for research and innovation. Research in the EU will receive a 12 percent increase in funding (Photo: Notat) Research commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn said on Monday (19 July) when presenting the plan that around 16,000 participants, including about 3,000 small and medium businesses, will receive funding.
"The investment I am announcing today will create 165,000 jobs over the relatively short term and potentially many many more over the long term," the commissioner told reporters. The sum represents a 12 percent increase on the €5.7 billion that will have been handed out in 2010. Grants will be allocated via calls for applications, some of which are to be issued on Tuesday. Small and medium-sized enterprises will receive close to €800 million next year. Travel grants for researchers will be worth €772 million. Primordial Sperm Gene Found | Wired Science. A gene involved in the production of sperm is shared by almost all living animals, including sea anemones, worms, insects, marine invertebrates, fish and humans. The finding suggests the ability to produce sperm arose just once, 600 million years ago, and has been conserved through all subsequent animal evolution.
“People have thought that there was a single common ancestor because we see sperm reproduction in many animals, but previously there was no conclusive evidence that sperm production has a single common origin in all animals,” said geneticist Eugene Xu from Northwestern University, co-author of the study being published July 15 in PLoS Genetics. Renee Reijo Pera, director of stem cell research at Stanford University, said the result is interesting because sperm cells have so much in common, but also need to be different enough to be specific to each species. “If a human could produce an egg that could be fertilized by a monkey it would be really bad,” she said. See Also: What should social software for science lo. Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science? The year is only a couple of weeks old, but it's already been a strange one for science news.
With a steady flow of coverage on a huge range of complex subjects, it's easy for things to go wrong, and for journalists to come up with material that doesn't get the science right. But a few recent cases appear to involve news organizations that have gone out of their way to get a science story wrong. The news industry tends to respond badly to cases where people make up the contents of their stories—witness Jayson Blair and the fake Bush National Guard records. But, so far, the response to the recent science news-related events has been complete indifference. The most egregious case seems to have happened at the UK's Daily Mail, which ran an article in the Science and Technology section of its website entitled "The mini ice age starts here. " There was small problem here, though: Mojib Latif is still alive, and was easy to get a hold of.
G1 > Ciência e Saúde - NOTÍCIAS - Veja imagens premiadas em conc. Liberdade poética - Foto de esfera verde microscópica envolta por fibras de polímeros foi batizada de 'Save our Earth. Let’s Go Green' (Foto: Sung Hoon Kang, Joanna Aizenberg, and Boaz Pokroy, Harvard University) A foto de uma esfera verde microscópica envolta por fibras de polímeros com diâmetros equivalentes a 1/500 de um fio de cabelo foi a grande vencedora de um concurso anual promovido pela revista "Science" e pela Fundação Nacional da Ciência, dos Estados Unidos, para premiar imagens científicas. Os autores da foto, batizada de "Save our Earth. Let's Go Green" (Salve a nossa Terra.
Vamos nos tornar verdes, em tradução livre), dizem que ela pode ser uma representação da necessidade de cooperação entre pessoas de todas as áreas para lidar com as questões mais importantes do planeta. Segundo um dos autores, o pesquisador Sung Hoon Kang, da Universidade Harvard, cada minúscula fibra pode representar uma pessoa. Leia mais notícias de Ciência. CU Team Discovers Tiny RNA Molecule With Big Implications for th. An extremely small RNA molecule created by a University of Colorado at Boulder team can catalyze a key reaction needed to synthesize proteins, the building blocks of life. The findings could be a substantial step toward understanding "the very origin of Earthly life," the lead researcher contends.
The smallest RNA enzyme ever known to perform a cellular chemical reaction is described in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper was written by CU graduate student Rebecca Turk, research associate Nataliya Chumachenko and Professor Michael Yarus of the molecular, cellular and developmental biology department.
Cellular RNA can have hundreds or thousands of its basic structural units, called nucleotides. Yarus' team focused on a ribozyme -- a form of RNA that can catalyze chemical reactions -- with only five nucleotides. Because proteins are complex, one vexing question is where the first proteins came from, Blumenthal said. "Dr. BBC - Earth News - Ants are first animal known to navigate by st. An artist's impression of how an ant may sense smell, creating an odour map Desert ants in Tunisia smell in stereo, sensing odours from two different directions at the same time. By sniffing the air with each antenna, the ants form a mental 'odour map' of their surroundings. They then use this map to find their way home, say scientists who report the discovery in the journal Animal Behaviour. Pigeons, rats and even people may also smell in stereo, but ants are the first animal known to use it for navigation.
Dr Markus Knaden and colleagues Dr Kathrin Steck and Professor Bill Hansson of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany investigated how the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis navigates around its surroundings. Each day, individual ants will leave the nest entrance and travel up to 100m in search of food. When they find some, they return straight home, somehow finding their tiny nest entrance again within a bleak, relatively featureless desert landscape.
Fish See Their Enemies’ Faces in Ultraviolet | Wired Science | W. The problem with science journalism… : Pharyngula. Breezy Love, or the Sacking of the Bees - Opinionator Blog - NYT. Mystery of Half-Male Chickens Solved. Lenin's Embalmers - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Science. Variations on dividing circular area into equal parts. U.S. stem cell expert is hottest researcher. Smoking, but not past alcohol abuse, may impair mental function. Childhood Adversity May Promote Cellular Aging. How plants put down roots. Copernicus Invented Geology, Study Claims. Robot folds towel, but does it do windows? - Science Fair: Scien. In the long run, all that ash can be a good thing - Los Angeles. Radiation-soaking metamaterial puts black in the shade - tech -