background preloader

General

Facebook Twitter

Science Errors & Conflicts

Analysis Of Neurotech Industry - News Markets. Give geo- and genetic engineering a fair trial - 07 September 2011. IN A city in eastern Brazil, scientists are preparing to release millions of genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild. If the trial works, the people of Juazeiro will have GM technology to thank for keeping them safe from dengue fever (see “Swarm troopers: Mutant armies waging war in the wild“). Meanwhile, in Bristol, UK, scientists are preparing one of the first experiments to figure out how to engineer the climate. If it works, we will be a step closer to developing a last-ditch option to mitigate some of the worst effects of climate change (see “Geoengineering trials get under way“).

At first glance these tests have little in common, but dig a little deeper and parallels start to emerge. Both trials reveal our uneasy relationship with our control of nature. The release of GM mosquitoes into the wild has so far attracted relatively little protest, following encouraging results from a field trial in the Cayman Islands. A similar argument applies to the use of GM mosquitoes. False memories generated in lab mice - life - 22 March 2012.

Computer modelling: Brain in a box. It wasn't quite the lynching that Henry Markram had expected. But the barrage of sceptical comments from his fellow neuroscientists — “It's crap,” said one — definitely made the day feel like a tribunal. Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists' first real chance to get answers about Markram's controversial proposal for the Human Brain Project (HBP) — an effort to build a supercomputer simulation that integrates everything known about the human brain, from the structures of ion channels in neural cell membranes up to mechanisms behind conscious decision-making. Markram, a South-African-born brain electrophysiologist who joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) a decade ago, may soon see his ambition fulfilled.

“Brain researchers are generating 60,000 papers per year,” said Markram as he explained the concept in Bern. Computers vs. Brains. Technology Is One Path Toward Sustainability. A case for modernization as the road to salvation by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus Illustration: Thom Lang / Corbis SOMETIME AROUND 2014, Italy will complete construction of seventy-eight mobile floodgates aimed at protecting Venice’s three inlets from the rising tides of the Adriatic Sea.

The massive doors—twenty meters by thirty meters, and five meters thick—will, most of the time, lie flat on the sandy seabed between the lagoon and the sea. But when a high tide is predicted, the doors will empty themselves of water and fill with compressed air, rising up on hinges to keep the Adriatic out of the city. Three locks will allow ships to move in and out of the lagoon while the gates are up.

Nowhere else in the world have humans so constantly had to create and re-create their infrastructure in response to a changing natural environment than in Venice. Furthermore, over the course of human history, those technologies have not only been created by us, but have also helped create us. How Deep Is the Ocean? [Infographic] ChronoZoom. ChronoZoom is an educational tool for teachers and students who want to put historical events in perspective.

A great many resources have been created already in ChronoZoom for your enjoyment and enlightenment. Start Exploring Use ChronoZoom to get a perspective of the extensive scale of time and historical events relative to what happened around the world. Become an author yourself! Simply log on with your social networking credentials to record your unique perspective or tell a story that needs to be told. New Teacher Resources RT @MSFTResearch: See how #Chronozoom helps students “think historically” & travel though time with 3 newly created curriculum modules http… #chronozoom is a valuable tool for illustrating Climate Change: @metanexus Anyone can author their small or Big History on the 14 Billion year timeline at - an open source project.

@BillGates Congratulations to the Big History Project. You don't have any favorite timelines yet. The Elements Revealed: An Interactive Periodic Table. In the October 2011 issue of Scientific American, we celebrate the International Year of Chemistry. Learn more about its impact on our daily lives in our Special Report. UPDATED: 06/18/2013 In honor of the 2013 Lindau meeting, which focuses on chemistry, we have updated our interactive periodic table with links to Nature Chemistry's In Your Element essay series. Each essay tells the story of a particular element, often describing its discovery, history and eventual uses. Main Sources & More to Explore: The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. By Deborah Blum. Interactive by Krista Fuentes Davide Castelvecchi Davide Castelvecchi is a freelance science writer based in Rome and a contributing editor for Scientific American magazine.

The Brittle Star's Apprentice. The secret molecular life of soap bubbles (1913) Nature can be extremely devious in the way it hides its secrets. Sometimes the most remarkable and profound insights are staring us right in the face every day in the most mundane phenomena. For instance, we have all seen the spectacular colors that can appear in soap bubbles: Image from Microscopy-uk.org.uk, by Michael Reese Much.

Borrowing his lovely images until I can produce my own! These colors are produced by optical interference, as we will discuss below; the “thin film optics” that creates bright colors in soap films also results in the bright colors of oil slicks. A rainbow of color produced by white light reflecting off of a thin layer of diesel fuel on water, via Wikipedia. Most of us would look at a soap film image and marvel at the beautiful rainbow colors; others would investigate the optics underlying them. Indicating that oxygen can only join with carbon in discrete amounts.

Jean Baptiste Perrin An example of destructive interference in thin films. Like this: Like Loading... The tiny things that rule the world. Wendy Zukerman, Asia-Pacific reporter Looking through the microscope, we can not only learn how the building blocks of life mix and interact, but also get a glimpse of the intricacy and beauty of this tiny world. Currently showing at Questacon, Australia’s Science and Technology Centre in Canberra, The Incredible Inner Space is an exhibition of stunning microscopic images dedicated to just that.

As the 28 images included in the display demonstrate, visualising this tiny world will be the key to developing new pesticides and medicines - and might even unlock secrets of prehistoric times. (Image: Michael Landsberg, University of Queensland) This looks like a scientist’s interpretation of being painted into a corner. The pink “wallpaper” is the single slices forming the 3D image, and the white shapes on the “carpet” beneath are the four individual proteins that create the toxin. (Image: Gerald Grellet-Tinner, the Field Museum, Chicago and Pat Trimby, University of Sydney) How Many Neutrons and Protons Can Get Along? Maybe 7,000. Scientists have long wondered whether there is a limit to the number of protons and neutrons that can be clustered together to form the nucleus of an atom.

A new study comes closer than ever to finding the answer by estimating the total number of nucleus variations that can exist. The periodic table of elements includes 118 known species of atoms, and each of these exists (either naturally or synthetically) in several versions with differing numbers of neutrons, giving rise to a total of about 3,000 different atomic nuclei. As technology has improved over the years, physicists have been building heavier and heavier atoms — element 117 was created only last year, and researchers are hot on the trail of 119. New projects are in the works to add and subtract neutrons to known elements to create ever more exotic variations, known as isotopes. But where does it end? Nuclear binding Even within those 7,000, the vast majority would be unstable, lasting only a tiny fraction of a second.

Space junk facts. Skip to Content Home » Space junk facts Space junk facts Bookmark/Search this post with: Copyright © 2014 . Copyright 2010 Ben Gilliland Theme by Dr. The 5 Most Mind-Blowingly Huge Machines Built By Science. Although it seems that modern technology is all about making everything smaller, when it comes to unlocking the secrets of the universe, science is all about going big.

Really big. Right at this moment, scientists and engineers are in the process of building -- or using -- instruments that look like the engine for a Star Destroyer. Like ... #5. The Death-Star-Sized Laser at the National Ignition Facility The competition to create the world's biggest laser sounds in every way like a duel between competing supervillains, with names like "The Omega Laser" and "The Z Machine.

" llnl.govThis thing has three giant shark tanks and no bathrooms. Yeah, that's the Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California. WikipediaIt's like Where's Waldo? So what does all of that stuff do? What could possibly be the purpose of such a thing, short of carving your name onto the face of the moon? WikipediaIn other words, the NIF is here to bust a nut. #4. Why? #3. Ha, no, not really. The next Pangaea will have pieces missing - environment - 16 September 2011. THE world's ultimate jigsaw puzzle will be missing a couple of pieces when it is next put together. A Pangaea-like supercontinent is forecast to form in 250 million years, but a new model predicts that superplumes rising from hotspots deep in the Earth's mantle will keep South America and Antarctica from re-merging with the other continents.

Supercontinents form, break apart, then form again every few hundred million years. Geophysicists have traced the process back to early in Earth's history by measuring magnetic fields in ancient rocks, and some have attempted to extrapolate from the present motion of the plates the likely shape of the next supercontinent. That supercontinent is already beginning to form: Africa is slowly colliding with Europe, and the fringes of Australia have begun to collide with Asia. Variously dubbed "Amasia" or "Novopangaea". New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist Invisible: Photo of a landscape no human can ever see (New Scientist)

Seeing Relativity: Trip out on a light-speed rollercoaster. Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV It's the ultimate ride for thrill-seekers: a rollercoaster hurtling down a track at near-light speed surrounded by colour changes and distortions. Now, an animation developed by physicist Michael Hush from the Australian National University in Canberra lets you see the effects described by Einstein's special theory of relativity, by creating a fictional world where the speed of light is about 5 metres per second.

As the ride begins, you experience colour shifting caused by the Doppler effect. Your surroundings also appear distorted as objects are seen at different points in time because of the finite speed of light. Due to the extreme velocity and the effect of angular compression, you start to see objects you've already passed by. As the rollercoaster passes over a series of bumps, colour-shifting and distortion increase and decrease. At this point, the animators ignore changes in colour to accentuate the bending and twisting of objects. Supervolcanoes Evolve Superquickly. The biggest eruptions on Earth may happen faster than volcanologists had thought. Giant blobs of magma appear underground and then pour onto the surface within centuries, suggests a new study of a California supereruption.

If the work holds true for other volcanoes, it means the most powerful eruptions don’t have magma chambers beneath them for very long. So if big changes start happening, like the ground rising or new geysers spouting, volcanologists might expect an eruption sooner rather than later. Yellowstone, for one, experienced a supereruption about 2.1 million years ago. “The fact that at Yellowstone there’s no giant magma body right now doesn’t mean that in hundreds to thousands of years we couldn’t have one,” says Guilherme Gualda, a geologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Gualda and his colleagues report the discovery May 30 in PLoS ONE. Fracking risk is exaggerated - environment - 11 January 2012. Frack away, there's no reason not to. Two of the main objections to "fracking" for shale gas have been blown out of proportion, according to British geologists.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves pumping water, sand and chemicals into methane-rich shale deposits around 2 kilometres underground to liberate natural gas. It has been accused of contaminating drinking water with methane and chemicals, and causing minor earthquakes. "We think the risk is pretty low," said Mike Stephenson, head of energy science at the British Geological Survey at a press briefing in London on Tuesday. The idea that fracked methane leaks into drinking water was popularised by the documentary film Gasland, in which a resident of Pennsylvania sets his tap water alight (see photo). On Tuesday, Stephenson said he could not comment on this specific case, but that such contamination is unlikely. More From New Scientist Strange 'Norway spiral' was an out-of-control missile (New Scientist) More from the web.

How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise [Video] A crowd observes the match playing on the main stage at the StarCraft 2 championships in Providence, RI. Credit: Major League Gaming If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking. The old phrase “united we stand, divided we fall” applies equally well to the mechanisms of attention as it does to a patriotic cause. When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when several goals splinter its focus, errors become unavoidable.

But clear exceptions challenge that general rule. Two weeks ago, thousands of computer game enthusiasts descended on a convention center in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, to observe some of these exceptions in action. For decades, a different game, chess, has held the exalted position of “the drosophila of cognitive science”—the model organism that scientists could poke and prod to learn what makes experts better than the rest of us.

Why StarCraft But that’s just one level of play. Indeed. Privacy through Uncertainty: Quantum Encryption | Guest Blog. A computer that thinks like the universe - Ideas. Later Terminator: We’re Nowhere Near Artificial Brains | The Crux. Molecules from scratch without the fiendish physics - physics-math - 10 February 2012. Technique May Reveal Where It All Began. A Bit of Progress: Diamonds Shatter Quantum Information Storage Record. Avatars set to shape real-world habits - tech - 12 March 2012. This is not a carrot: Paraconsistent mathematics. A Tweet is Worth (at least) 140 Words. George Dyson | Evolution and Innovation - Information Is Cheap, Meaning Is Expensive | The European Magazine.

Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel. Beliefs About Alien Intelligence. Evolution has given humans a huge advantage over most other animals: middle age. Pixelating the Genome | Oscillator. 6 Guys in a Capsule: 520 Days on a Simulated Mars Mission | Magazine. Coming to Your Senses: How to Really Taste That Cup of Coffee - Giorgio Milos - Life. Flashes of Reality | Letters to Earth. The Many Faces of Happiness. Seth Stein: The quake killer. Japan megaquake shifted gravity satellite orbits - environment - 07 December 2011. The World’s Muddiest Disaster. Phase-change materials can fix machine memory crunch - tech - 30 January 2012. Madame Curie's Passion | History & Archaeology. Raising the Dead: New Species of Life Resurrected from Ancient Andean Tomb.

The Perfect Milk Machine: How Big Data Transformed the Dairy Industry - Alexis Madrigal. How Listeners Shape the Evolution of Music. Doomsday Clock Moved 1 Minute Closer to Midnight. The Bioterrorist Next Door - By Laurie Garrett. What Day Is Doomsday? How to Mentally Calculate the Day of the Week for Any Date. After 4 Years, Checking Up on The Svalbard Global Seed Vault - Ross Andersen - Technology. DNA reveals that cows were almost impossible to domesticate. Flame Retardants May Create Deadlier Fires. The Vega Science Trust - Science Video - Homepage. Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World.

The Knight’s Song, or What is a [scientific] theory? Species Concepts | EvoEcoLab. Why Science Is Better When It's Multinational.