Quantum Calculations Can Make Atomic Clocks of the Future Far More Accurate | Wired Science. New calculations of how atoms swell when they’re warmed up can help make the next generation of atomic clocks 10 times more precise. The current precision champ, the quantum-logic clock developed last year at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, keeps time to within a second every 3.7 billion years.
Future clocks that use the new improvements would be accurate to a second every 32 billion years — more than twice the age of the universe. Such ultra-precise clocks are based on the quick vibrations of a single aluminum ion, an atom that has lost one electron, held in a vacuum and confined by electromagnetic fields. The remaining electrons form a shell around the atom’s nucleus. “With a laser pulse, you can tap that shell and make it ring like a bell,” said physicist Till Rosenband of NIST, who built the existing quantum-logic clock. “Because it’s ringing so fast, it’s dividing time into much smaller intervals,” Rosenband said. See Also: Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds | Wired Science.
When people can learn what others think, the wisdom of crowds may veer towards ignorance. In a new study of crowd wisdom — the statistical phenomenon by which individual biases cancel each other out, distilling hundreds or thousands of individual guesses into uncannily accurate average answers — researchers told test participants about their peers’ guesses. As a result, their group insight went awry. “Although groups are initially ‘wise,’ knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines” collective wisdom, wrote researchers led by mathematician Jan Lorenz and sociologist Heiko Rahut of Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 16. “Even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect.”
Study participants were asked how many murders occurred in Switzerland in 2006. As Surowiecki explained, certain conditions must be met for crowd wisdom to emerge. See Also: Climatology-Defying Paper Yanked for Plagiarism | Wired Science. By John Timmer, Ars Technica The so-called “hockey stick” plot of recent climate, in which recent temperatures appear as a sudden and anomalous rise after a thousand years of relative stability, has become a bit of an icon for climate change. Even though it’s rather secondary to the concerns about rising greenhouse gas levels — CO2 would be a concern even if we were limited to the 150 years of instrument records — the hockey stick attracted so much attention that, in 2006, it was the subject of congressional hearings. Now, it appears that the sharpest critic of climate scientists at those hearings relied on plagiarized material to prepare his report. [partner id="arstechnica" align="right"]The report in question was prepared by Edward Wegman of George Mason University.
In it, he criticized the methods used to generate a version of the hockey stick graph generated by Michael Mann, a Penn State climatologist. (Similar results have been produced by other researchers.) Source: Ars Technica. Scientists Fight University of California to Study Rare Ancient Skeletons | Wired Science. SAN DIEGO — Two ancient skeletons uncovered in 1976 on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, during construction at the home of a University of California chancellor, may be among the most valuable for genetic analysis in the continental United States.
Dated between 9,000 and 9,600 years old, the exceptionally preserved bones could potentially produce the oldest complete human genome from the continent. But only if scientists aren’t barred from studying them. Attempts to unlock the skeletons’ genetic secrets are stalled in a dispute pitting UC scientists against their own administration. Five of the scientists wrote with alarm in a letter published May 20 in the journal Science that UC administrators aren’t allowing studies on the skeletons, which were discovered on property owned by UC San Diegoin La Jolla, California.
“This is Kennewick Man II,” White said, referring to the long federal court battle in 2004 when scientists won the right to study bones found in Washington. Geometric Principles Appear Universal in Our Minds | Wired Science. In a South American jungle, far from traffic circles, city squares and the Pentagon, beats the heart of geometry.
Villagers belonging to an Amazonian group called the Mundurucú intuitively grasp abstract geometric principles despite having no formal math education, say psychologist Véronique Izard, of Université Paris Descartes, and her colleagues. [partner id="sciencenews" align="right"]Mundurucú adults and 7- to 13-year-olds demonstrate as firm an understanding of the properties of points, lines and surfaces as adults and school-age children in the United States and France, Izard’s team reports online May 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. U.S. children between ages 5 and 7 partially understand geometric space, but not to the same extent as older children and adults, the researchers find.
These results suggest two possible routes to geometric knowledge. Both possibilities present puzzles, she adds. Izard and Pica first probed knowledge of straight lines. See Also: Top 10 New Species Discovered in 2010 | Wired Science. Madagascar: Andasibe-Mantadia National Park, Mantadia Reserve. Caerostris female (MTCA05F), web 41x46x19. 24.iv.2008. Photo M. KuntnerMadagascar: Andasibe-Mantadia National Park, Mantadia Reserve. Caerostris female (MTCA03F on 24.iv.), web 70x92x30, 3 kleptos. 24.iv.2008. Photo M. Images: 1. Electrons Are Near-Perfect Spheres | Wired Science. By Duncan Geere, Wired UK A 10-year study has revealed that the electron is very spherical indeed. [partner id="wireduk" align="right"]To be precise, the electron differs from being perfectly round by less than 0.000000000000000000000000001 cm. To put that in context; if an electron was the size of the solar system, it would be out from being perfectly round by less than the width of a human hair.
The Imperial College team behind the research, which was conducted on molecules of ytterbium flouride, used a laser to make measurements of the motion of electrons, and in particular the wobble they exhibit when spinning. The co-author of the report describing the research, Jony Hudson, said: “We’re really pleased that we’ve been able to improve our knowledge of one of the basic building blocks of matter. The next step is to up that precision level even further, using new methods to cool the molecules to extremely low temperatures and control their motion. Image: Lawrence Rayner/Flickr See Also: The Man Who Swims With Coelacanths | Wired Science. More than seven decades later, the words have the same urgency as when they rolled off Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer’s telegraph machine and into history: Courtenay-Latimer was the young curator of a natural history museum on South Africa’s east coast. The message came from J.L.B. Smith, an icthyologist to whom she’d turned when, shortly before Christmas in 1938, local fishermen brought her a fish unlike any they’d ever seen.
Caught at a depth of 240 feet, it was five feet long, covered in bony scales and had fins reminiscent of legs. Courtenay-Latimer immediately sent a sketch to Smith, who thought it looked like a coelacanth. There was just one catch: Coelacanths were extinct, and had been for 70 million years. The sketch sent by Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer to J.L.B. Smith’s famous cable came too late, as Courtenay-Latimer didn’t have enough formaldehyde to preserve the fish. Wired.com: How did your interest in coelacanths begin? Hans Fricke: When I was young, I read the book by J.L.B. Disbelieving Free Will Makes Brain Less Free | Wired Science. If people are told that free will doesn’t exist, their brains might follow suit. A test of people who read passages discrediting the notion of free will found an immediate decrease in brain activity related to voluntary action. The findings are just one data point in ongoing scientific investigation of a millennia-old philosophical conundrum, but they raise an intriguing possibility.
“Our results indicate that beliefs about free will can change brain processes related to a very basic motor level,” wrote researchers led by psychologist Davide Rigoni of Italy’s University of Padova in a study published in May’s Psychological Science. ‘Abstract belief systems might have a much more fundamental effect than previously thought.’ Rigoni’s team asked 30 people to read passages from Francis Crick’s 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul.
Half read a passage that didn’t mention free will, while the others read a passage describing it as illusory. See Also: Desktop Big Bang Shows Time Travel May Be Possible After All | Wired Science. The first desktop model of the Big Bang reportedly showed why time travel doesn’t work. But a new look suggests time travel may be possible after all, at least on the lab bench. Electrical engineers Igor Smolyaninov and Yu-Ju Hung of the University of Maryland announced in April that their model Big Bang — made from metamaterials that move light just as particles move through mathematical representations of space and time — suggested time travel’s impossibility.
Light couldn’t be steered in a circle, they said. Therefore particles couldn’t loop back to the space-time point where they began. But physicist Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews in Scotland disagrees. The discrepancy comes down to the direction in which the light waves wiggle. According to Leonhardt, the equations used by Smolyaninov are valid when the magnetic field — not the electric field — points upwards. “That doesn’t mean that real time travel is possible,” he said. Image: Igor Smolyaninov See Also: New Fossils Push Homo Erectus Origins Back to Asia | Wired Science. By John Timmer, Ars Technica The story of the evolution of modern humans can be a bit confusing, species-wise, with many early hominins co-existing without an obvious linear succession. But, geographically, all the action has appeared to take place in Africa, at least until the appearance of Homo erectus, which left Africa and spread globally, only to be replaced by later species of African origin: us.
Over the past year or so, however, our history has become a bit more complicated, with evidence that our ancestors interbred with earlier human relatives that had already dispersed throughout Asia. Now, earlier events are also looking a bit more confused, as archeological finds in the nation of Georgia are being promoted as evidence that Homo erectus didn’t even get its start in Africa. [partner id="arstechnica" align="right"]The site of the new finds, Dmanisi, is only about 50km away from Georgia’s capital Tblisi, and has been making waves in the field of human origins for a while. Plant Origami Shows How Dead Things Can Move | Wired Science. By determining how a desert plant’s seed pods unfurl when they get wet, biologists discovered new principles for designing materials that respond to their environments. Eventually, the insights may help engineers improve satellites or develop artificial muscles. Biologist Matthew Harrington and his colleagues at Germany’s Max Planck Institute set out to explain the mysteries of the “ice plant,” Delosperma nakurense, a succulent that grows in arid and semi-arid regions of eastern Africa.
The plant has adapted to dry conditions by producing special seed capsules that protect their cargo with a boxlike lid of five petal-like sections. When it rains, the capsules unfold. When the capsules dry up, they return to their original shape. The cycle can happen over and over, though by the time ice plant seed capsules perform their origami feats, they’ve long since been separated from the living plants that created them. See Also: Many Exo-Earths May Have Exo-Moons | Wired Science. As many as one in four Earthlike extrasolar planets should have a moon-like moon, new supercomputer simulations show. Having a massive moon may be needed for complex life to evolve on a wildly tilting planet. Earth’s moon raised ocean tides and stabilized our planet’s chaotic spin, allowing life’s baby steps to occur in relative peace.
“Without a large moon, our Earth would spin around randomly,” said astronomer Ben Moore of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, coauthor of a paper to appear in the journal Icarus. “Maybe it’s unlikely that a planet would have a massive moon, and that makes the Earth sort of special.” At one-quarter of Earth’s diameter and more than 1 percent of its mass, Earth’s moon is proportionately one of the largest satellites in the solar system.
It holds Earth’s rotation axis at 23.3 degrees, with a deviation of just 1.3 degrees every 41,000 years. Mars, by contrast, oscillates by 10 degrees every few hundred thousand years. “This is good quality stuff. See Also: Earthrise | Wired Science. Giant Ground Sloth For Sale, $450K OBO | Wired Science. This 11-foot-tall relic of North America's megafauna-filled past could be yours for around half a million dollars, if you manage to outbid all the other sloth-obsessed tycoons.Sloths aren't your thing? Then perhaps you'd prefer to spend $2.8 million on a set of two dinosaurs. Or $875,000 for a meteorite. Or $60,000 on a giant elephant bird egg. More than 260 lots of fossils, minerals and other treasures, including the world's largest shark jaw, will be up for bids June 12 in Dallas in one of the biggest natural history auctions ever.
AmmonitePlacenticeras intercalare65 million to 145 million years oldBearpaw Formation, Alberta, CanadaEstimated Value: $40,000A huge and dazzling example of these highly sought-after specimens, this extremely bright, colorful ammonite flashes across its entire surface on both sides with a gorgeous combination of fiery iridescent red, green, orange and gold, with hints of the extremely rare blue-purple. Ancient Fossils Have Evolution’s First Shells | Wired Science. A series of spectacularly preserved, 750-million-year-old fossils represent the microscopic origins of biomineralization, or the ability to convert minerals into hard, physical structures.
This process is what makes bones, shells, teeth and hair possible, literally shaping the animal kingdom and even Earth itself. The fossils were pried from ancient rock formations in Canada’s Yukon by earth scientists Francis Macdonald and Phoebe Cohen of Harvard University. In a June Geology paper, they describe their findings as providing “a unique window into the diversity of early eukaryotes.”
That window opens into an evolutionary period less celebrated than the kaleidoscopic radiations of the Cambrian, but in its own way no less impressive. One such innovation was biomineralization, though evidence for its occurrence at this time was inconclusive. Archeoxybaphon. In the new study, Cohen and Macdonald examined hundreds of fossils under microscopes. Bicorniculum.
Top image: Characodictyon. See Also: Nanomagnetic Computers Are the Ultimate in Efficiency | Wired Science. The Mismeasures of Stephen Jay Gould | Wired Science. Video: Year of Moon Motion in 2.5 Minutes | Wired Science. How to Have Fun Like Monkeys, Whales and Foxes | Wired Science. Photos of Total Lunar Eclipse From Around the World | Wired Science. Time-Traveling Male Sea Monkeys Make Bad Mates | Wired Science. Humans Could Have Geomagnetic Sight | Wired Science. The Weird and Beautiful World of Fluid Dynamics | Wired Science. City Life Could Change Your Brain for the Worse | Wired Science. Life on Earth Arose Just Once | Wired Science. Foucault’s Pendulum Dented in Museum Mishap | Wired Science | Wi. The Tragic Race to Be First to the South Pole | Wired Science | The Crystals at the Center of the Earth | Wired Science | Wired. Early Birds’ Wings Probably Didn’t Flap | Wired Science | Wired. Congress Opens Investigation Into Genetic Testing Companies | Wi. China Could Wipe Out Recycled Toilet Paper | Wired Science | Wir.
Networked Networks Are Prone to Epic Failure | Wired Science | W. Photos Surface of the Day Einstein Died | Wired Science | Wired. Lousy DNA Reveals When People First Wore Clothes | Wired Science. Could a Mini Horse Be Bred Small Enough to Fit in Your Palm? | W. New Giant Lizard Discovered in the Philippines | Wired Science | DNA Testing Finds Endangered Whale Meat in Restaurants | Wired S. Lost Tribes Used Clever Tricks to Turn Amazon Wasteland to Farms. North American Dinosaurs Were One Big Happy Family | Wired Scien. See Better by Believing You Can | Wired Science. New Evidence of Ice Age Comet Found in Ice Cores | Wired Science.
Skydiver Aims to Jump From 120,000 Feet, Break the Sound Barrier. Complex Life Traced to Ancient Gene Parasites | Wired Science | Climate Hackers Want to Write Their Own Rules | Wired Science | Fossil Antelope Teeth Hold Clues to Europe’s Missing Apes | Wire. Russian Physicists Synthesize New Superheavy Element 117 | Wired. Evolution’s New Foe: Timid School Administrators | Wired Science. 95-Million-Year-Old Bugs Found in African Amber Surprise Scienti. Fossil Turtle Had Extra-Thick Shell to Fend Off World’s Largest. EPA Scientist Says East Coast Beaches Threatened by Sea Level, B. Q&A: Geoengineering Is ‘A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come’ | Wired. Possible New Human Ancestor Discovered | Wired Science | Wired.c. Video: Chimpanzees Mourn Their Dead | Wired Science. Origin of Life Chicken-and-Egg Problem Solved | Wired Science | First Animals Found That Live Without Oxygen | Wired Science | W.