Lasers create table-top supernova 1-Jun-2014 [ Print | E-mail ] Share [ Close Window ] Contact: University of Oxford News Officenews.office@admin.ox.ac.uk 44-186-528-0528University of Oxford Laser beams 60,000 billion times more powerful than a laser pointer have been used to recreate scaled supernova explosions in the laboratory as a way of investigating one of the most energetic events in the Universe. Supernova explosions, triggered when the fuel within a star reignites or its core collapses, launch a detonation shock wave that sweeps through a few light years of space from the exploding star in just a few hundred years. To investigate what may cause these peculiar shapes an international team led by Oxford University scientists (groups of Professor Gregori and Professor Bell in Atomic and Laser Physics, and Professor Schekochihin in Theoretical Physics) has devised a method of studying supernova explosions in the laboratory instead of observing them in space. [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] AAAS and EurekAlert!
A review of Her by Ray Kurzweil (credit: Warner Brothers) Her, written, directed and produced by Spike Jonze, presents a nuanced love story between a man and his operating system. Although there are caveats I could (and will) mention about the details of the OS and how the lovers interact, the movie compellingly presents the core idea that a software program (an AI) can — will — be believably human and lovable. This is a breakthrough concept in cinematic futurism in the way that The Matrix presented a realistic vision that virtual reality will ultimately be as real as, well, real reality. Jonze started his feature-motion-picture career directing Being John Malkovich, which also presents a realistic vision of a future technology — one that is now close at hand: being able to experience reality through the eyes and ears of someone else. With emerging eye-mounted displays that project images onto the wearer’s retinas and also look out at the world, we will indeed soon be able to do exactly that. More realistic, but imperfect
100 Things Personality Test - VisualDNA When You’re A Naked Mole Rat, Why Stop At One Weapon Against Aging? In June I wrote about the amazing longevity of naked mole rats. These rodents can live for thirty years, whereas their mice cousins can only live two years. One secret to their longevity may be the fact that they’ve never been documented with cancer. As I wrote back in June, scientists at the University of Rochester found a gooey protein in the tissues of the rodents that prevents cells from multiplying out of control. But naked mole rats do more than just fight cancer. Like other animals, naked mole rats carry DNA that encodes thousands of genes. If the ribosome picks the wrong building block, a protein may end up with a defective shape and can’t do its job properly. The Rochester team took a look at how naked mole rats build proteins. To see if two 28S molecules worked differently than just one, the researchers compared how the naked mole rats make proteins to the process in mice. The scientists found that the naked mole rat cells were much darker than those of mice.
Smoking Marijuana Not Linked with Lung Damage Marijuana does not impair lung function—at least not in the doses inhaled by the majority of users, according to the largest and longest study ever to consider the issue, which was published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers working on a long-term study of risk factors for cardiovascular disease (the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults or CARDIA study) tested the lung function of 5115 young adults over the course of 20 years, starting in 1985 when they were aged 18 to 30. They found that marijuana use was almost as common as cigarette smoking in the sample, which was designed to reflect the U.S. population. Among participants, the average marijuana user toked 2-3 times a month, while the average tobacco user smoked eight cigarettes a day. The study was “well conducted” and is “essentially confirmatory of the findings from several previous studies that have examined the association between marijuana smoking and lung function,” says Dr.
Physicists To Test If Universe Is A Computer Simulation Physicists have devised a new experiment to test if the universe is a computer. A philosophical thought experiment has long held that it is more likely than not that we're living inside a machine. The theory basically goes that any civilisation which could evolve to a 'post-human' stage would almost certainly learn to run simulations on the scale of a universe. And that given the size of reality - billions of worlds, around billions of suns - it is fairly likely that if this is possible, it has already happened. And if it has? Well, then the statistical likelihood is that we're located somewhere in that chain of simulations within simulations. And it's not just theory. READ MORE: Physicists Have Evidence Universe Is Computer Simulation Now another team have devised an actual test to see if this theory holds any hope of being proven. This is where it gets complex. And if such signatures do appear in both? Zohreh Davoudi, one of Savage's students, goes further:
imgfave - amazing and inspiring images Why one microbe seemingly doesn't age at all Aging is an inevitable fact of life for most organisms, but one particular microbe has found a way to avoid getting older, at least in a sense, a new study finds. Under favorable conditions, the microbe, a species of yeast called S. pombe, does not age the way other microbes do, the researchers said. Typically, when single-celled organisms divide in half, one half acquires the majority of older, often damaged cell material, while the other half acquires mostly new cell material. But in the new study, researchers found that under favorable, nonstressful growing conditions, S. pombe (a single-celled organism) divided in such a way that both halves acquired about equal parts of old cell material. What's more, previous research has shown that when cells divide and continuously pass on old cell material, the cells that get the old material start to divide more slowly — a sign of aging. That's not to say that S. pombe cells don't die.
We’re in a war over climate change - Paul B. Farrell By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch Reuters Steam rises from the stacks of the coal-fired Jim Bridger Power Plant outside Point of the Rocks, Wyoming in this file photo taken March 14, 2014. SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. In the past decade America spent over $7 trillion on the Pentagon’s budget. Well, the president finally launched a counterattack, rearming America with new EPA regulations targeting large carbon emitters, coal-burning power plants. Yes, the new EPA regs may minimize the more immediate dangers of all the incoming bogies that trigger global warming — auto pollution, fracking, methane, hot oceans, overfishing, deforestation, glaciers melting. WWIII? WWIII Phase 2: new EPA regs vs. Yes, global-warming politics is an American war, started by the Bush Pentagon. The GOP counterattacked: House Speaker John Boehner called the new EAP regs a “war on coal” that “will kill 224,000 jobs and surge electric bills by $17 billion every year.” 1. 2. 3. Buffett says buy what you know.