Posts filed under 'Science'
Damn, what does the NYT Science section have against Al Gore? First the wankeriffic John Tierney uses the upcoming Inconvenient Truth opera as an excuse to mock him, then they try to claim that the internet was invented years before Al was even born:
In 1934, [Paul] Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”
(…)
Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.
Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”
Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes — not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life’s work.
Amazing - he conceptualized hyperlinks before there were even computers.
June 17th, 2008 at 09:44pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Environment,
Gore,
Science
Looks like creationism is getting more & more subtle. From creationism to “creation science” (coughcoughoxymoroncoughcoughcough) to “intelligent design,” and now… “strengths & weaknesses”:
Starting this summer, the [Texas] state education board will determine the curriculum for the next decade and decide whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution should be taught. The benign-sounding phrase, some argue, is a reasonable effort at balance. But critics say it is a new strategy taking shape across the nation to undermine the teaching of evolution, a way for students to hear religious objections under the heading of scientific discourse.
Already, legislators in a half-dozen states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina — have tried to require that classrooms be open to “views about the scientific strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory,” according to a petition from the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based strategic center of the intelligent design movement.
“Very often over the last 10 years, we’ve seen antievolution policies in sheep’s clothing,” said Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education, a group based in Oakland, Calif., that is against teaching creationism.
The “strengths and weaknesses” language was slipped into the curriculum standards in Texas to appease creationists when the State Board of Education first mandated the teaching of evolution in the late 1980s. It has had little effect because evolution skeptics have not had enough power on the education board to win the argument that textbooks do not adequately cover the weaknesses of evolution.
Yet even as courts steadily prohibited the outright teaching of creationism and intelligent design, creationists on the Texas board grew to a near majority. Seven of 15 members subscribe to the notion of intelligent design, and they have the blessings of Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.
What happens in Texas does not stay in Texas: the state is one of the country’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are loath to produce different versions of the same material. The ideas that work their way into education here will surface in classrooms throughout the country.
“ ‘Strengths and weaknesses’ are regular words that have now been drafted into the rhetorical arsenal of creationists,” said Kathy Miller, director of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that promotes religious freedom.
The chairman of the state education board, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist in Central Texas, denies that the phrase “is subterfuge for bringing in creationism.”
“Why in the world would anybody not want to include weaknesses?” Dr. McLeroy said.
The word itself is open to broad interpretation. If the teaching of weaknesses is mandated, a textbook might be forced to say that evolution has an “inability to explain the Cambrian Explosion,” according to the group Texans for Better Science Education, which questions evolution.
(…)
[P]laying to the American sense of fairness, lawmakers across the country have tried to require that classrooms be open to all views. The Discovery Institute has provided a template for legislators to file “academic freedom” bills, and they have been popping up with increasing frequency in statehouses across the country. In Florida, the session ended last month before legislators could take action, while in Louisiana, an academic-freedom bill was sent to the House of Representatives after passing the House education committee and the State Senate.
In Texas, evolution foes do not have to win over the entire Legislature, only a majority of the education board; they are one vote away.
Dr. McLeroy, the board chairman, sees the debate as being between “two systems of science.”
“You’ve got a creationist system and a naturalist system,” he said.
Dr. McLeroy believes that Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event — thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion. “I believe a lot of incredible things,” he said, “The most incredible thing I believe is the Christmas story. That little baby born in the manger was the god that created the universe.”
But Dr. McLeroy says his rejection of evolution — “I just don’t think it’s true or it’s ever happened” — is not based on religious grounds. Courts have clearly ruled that teachings of faith are not allowed in a science classroom, but when he considers the case for evolution, Dr. McLeroy said, “it’s just not there.”
(…)
Views like these not only make biology teachers nervous, they also alarm those who have a stake in the state’s reputation for scientific exploration. “Serious students will not come to study in our universities if Texas is labeled scientifically backward,” said Dr. Dan Foster, former chairman of the department of medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
“I’m an orthodox Christian,” Dr. Foster said, “and I don’t want to say that Christianity is crazy.” But science, not scripture, belongs in a classroom, he said. To allow views that undermine evolution, he said, “puts belief on the same level as scientific evidence.”
(…)
“When you consider evolution, there are certainly questions that have yet to be answered,” said Mr. Fisher, science coordinator for the Lewisville Independent School District in North Texas.
But, he added, “a question that has yet to be answered is certainly different from an alleged weakness.”
Mr. Fisher points to the flaws in Darwinian theory that are listed on an anti-evolution Web site, strengthsandweaknesses.org, which is run by Texans for Better Science Education.
“Many of them are decades old,” Mr. Fisher said of the flaws listed. “They’ve all been thoroughly refuted.”
A case based on zombie lies that won’t die? Sounds like the Republican approach to pretty much everything. I love McElroy’s desperate efforts to make it sound like his stance is based solely on reasonable, non-religious commonsense grounds, not religious fanaticism at all. Riiiight. But the thought that this anti-science wanker is just one seat away from controlling Texas’s board of education is absolutely terrifying.
June 5th, 2008 at 07:27am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Religion,
Republicans,
Science
(Quote from Southland Tales)
I was promised flying cars…
Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.
Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.
At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.
He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.
Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.
This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year — Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)
“Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories,” he said, and showed a graph of computing power starting with the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago. At first the machines’ power doubled every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moore’s Law); now it takes only about a year.
(…)
Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.
(…)
Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.
He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.
“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”
I hope he’s right. I totally can’t wait to become an immortal cyborg.
June 3rd, 2008 at 07:33am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science,
Technology
Well, okay, it’s just a robot hand - but it’s still pretty cool:
In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill.
The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.
(…)
In the experiment, two macaques first used a joystick to gain a feel for the arm, which had shoulder joints, an elbow and a grasping claw with two mechanical fingers.
(…)
The scientists used the computer to help the monkeys move the arm at first, essentially teaching them with biofeedback.
After several days, the monkeys needed no help. They sat stationary in a chair, repeatedly manipulating the arm with their brain to reach out and grab grapes, marshmallows and other nuggets dangled in front of them. The snacks reached the mouths about two-thirds of the time — an impressive rate, compared with earlier work.
The monkeys learned to hold the grip open on approaching the food, close it just enough to hold the food and gradually loosen the grip when feeding.
On several occasions, a monkey kept its claw open on the way back, with the food stuck to one finger. At other times, a monkey moved the arm to lick the fingers clean or to push a bit of food into its mouth while ignoring a newly presented morsel.
The animals were apparently freelancing, discovering new uses for the arm, showing “displays of embodiment that would never be seen in a virtual environment,” the researchers wrote.
“In the real world, things don’t work as expected,” said the senior author of the paper, Dr. Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. “The marshmallow sticks to your hand or the food slips, and you can’t program a computer to anticipate all of that.
“But the monkeys’ brains adjusted. They were licking the marshmallow off the prosthetic gripper, pushing food into their mouth, as if it were their own hand.”
(…)
…Dr. Schwartz’s team, Dr. Donoghue’s group and others are working on all of the problems, and the two macaques’ rapid learning curve in taking ownership of a foreign limb gives scientists confidence that the main obstacles are technical and, thus, negotiable.
In an editorial accompanying the Nature study, Dr. John F. Kalaska, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, argued that after such bugs had been worked out, scientists might even discover areas of the cortex that allow more intimate, subtle control of prosthetic devices.
Such systems, Dr. Kalaska wrote, “would allow patients with severe motor deficits to interact and communicate with the world not only by the moment-to-moment control of the motion of robotic devices, but also in a more natural and intuitive manner that reflects their overall goals, needs and preferences.”
The potential really is amazing. And, sadly, we have an ever-increasing group of combat veterans who could really benefit from it.
May 29th, 2008 at 10:29pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science,
Technology
As much as I like Olivia Judson, I think she’s kinda off the mark here:
…[E]ach mass extinction has been followed by a pulse of fresh evolutionary change: large numbers of new forms appear. The reason is that before the mass extinction, most niches are occupied — a situation that typically prevents radical changes. Afterwards, many niches are empty and available for re-occupation — which promotes rapid change….
Taking the long view, then, the extinctions we are causing may open the way to a burst of evolutionary invention, the creation of new forms even more remarkable than those around today.
I really wish that I could believe that. The problem is, as long as humans go on being humans, the manmade stresses on - or outright destruction of - those niches will continue, and will kill off any emerging species just as surely as they killed off the existing ones. This clean slate/renewal model only works when the mass extinctions are caused by a one-time catastrophic event, not a catastrophic event that hangs around, continuing to be catastrophic, for millenia upon millenia.
To be completely fair, Judson talks about a 10 million year timeframe for new species to emerge, so there’s a chance that mankind will have either died out, moved on, or changed its ways by then. Although there’s an even better chance that we will have wrecked the planet beyond repair well before then, leaving nothing but wasteland behind for prospective new species to occupy.
And that’s your cheery thought for the day.
May 29th, 2008 at 07:18am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Science
Typically, in technology circles, the term “convergence” means the eventual combining of the television and the PC into a single device, which, frankly, I kinda have a hard time seeing. The convergence that I’ve been seeing lately, which I find very intriguing, is between cellphones and computers, as the former get more and more powerful, and the latter get more and more compact.
We are nearing a point where screen and keyboard size will actually be more significant limiting factors than storage or processing power - and I think foldable OLED screens will provide much relief there, especially if they can also function as touchscreen keyboards.
But that’s not the kind of convergence I want to talk about, either. I was reading Olivia Judson’s NYT blog entry on cytological hybrids, or “cybrids”: a cell from one species implanted whole into an egg cell of another species, becoming its nucleus, and eventually an embryo of the cell “donor” species, and it hit me. This is just like the DIY hackers I read about all the time in Engadget, the people who stick the guts of a Sega Dreamcast into a jewelry case to create a brand-new portable console.
Not only that, but I’m fascinated by DNA’s similarities to computer code: It’s a set of instructions that is both complex and modular - snippets of it can be copied and pasted to perform the same functions in completely different programs! It’s also bloated with a lot of useless legacy code that no longer serves a function - some of which is actually old viruses that have been defanged and absorbed. There can even be copying errors, and compatibility issues if the DNA in a transplanted egg nucleus doesn’t mesh with the DNA in the egg’s mitochondria (which is in fact modified bacteria code).
My point is, the most fascinating and important convergence coming down the pike is the one between technology and biology. Right now, we’re at the novice stage when it comes to DNA and cell biology, copying and pasting and tweaking here and there, but I think there will come a day when we can actually read DNA like any other kind of programming language. Which means that we could write and edit it, too. Which would be both cool (we wouldn’t have to go looking for a gene to perform the function we want - we could just write it from scratch) and kinda scary (what happens when a gene programmer screws up, or a bioterrorist writes The Perfect Virus?).
I’m not sure whether I’m looking forward to it or dreading it, but the possibilities and threats are wide open.
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:09pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science,
Technology
Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
I don’t really have a point. I just like walruses.
Actually, read the story. Walruses are even smarter and more awesome than I thought.
May 19th, 2008 at 09:16pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science
I mean, this wouldn’t scar a kid for life or anything, right?
When Deb Roy and his wife, Rupal Patel, learned of their impending bundle of joy, they did what many first-time parents do: They got a video camera. Actually, they bought 11 video cameras and 14 state-of-the-art microphones. Then they built a temperature-controlled data-storage room in their basement and loaded it with, among other gear, five Apple Xserves and a 4.4TB Xserve RAID, backup tape drives, and robotic tape changers. No, Roy and Patel hadn’t instantly become the world’s most doting parents; instead, they had hatched a plan to record practically every waking moment of their son’s first three years.
The high-powered academic couple—he directs of the Cognitive Machines Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, and she directs the Communication Analysis and Design Laboratory at Northeastern University—scrambled to convert their suburban Boston home into a state-of-the-art research center that would host the most ambitious study ever conducted on how children acquire language. They named the linguistic data-mining odyssey the Human Speechome Project (HSP)…. In addition to their roles as primary investigators in the study, Roy and Patel are, along with their now two-year-old son, the central research subjects.
“My ultimate goal is to understand how language works,” Roy explains. That’s a tall order, and the logical place to start, he maintains, is with children. Decades of inquiry involving video and audio recordings of children interacting with caregivers and psychologists in institutional “speech labs” have laid a foundation to begin answering questions about how children develop language skills. The day-in/day-out interactions between children and adults, Roy points out, are key to the way children grasp language. “But for all of the interest in how children learn language, there’s no comprehensive data of even a single child’s development,” Roy says. “Most researchers rely on speech recordings that cover less than 1.5 percent of a child’s complete linguistic experience.”
And that simply isn’t a dense or broad enough data set to answer the kinds of deep questions that Roy thinks are necessary to uncover the steady process of language acquisition. Truly understanding how human beings acquire language requires “stepping into a child’s shoes.”
So, from the moment he arrived home from the hospital, Roy and Patel’s son has lived under the almost constant observation of the 14 microphones and 11 video cameras that are embedded in the ceiling over every major room of the house. “Somewhere around 80 percent of his waking hours at home are being recorded,” says Roy. For the other 20 percent, privacy considerations permit mom, dad and other caregivers to turn off the cameras or microphones using wall-mounted touch panels in each room. Roy also equipped each controller with an emergency “oops” switch, marked with a giant exclamation point, to erase any particularly embarrassing family moments.
(…)
…Twenty-two months into the project, Roy says the storage network holds approximately 250TB of data, and by the end of the project in another year he expects it to grow to a full capacity of 1.4 petabytes (million gigabytes). That’s enough room to hold digitized copies of every book in the Library of Congress–10 times over.
I’m sure this could end up contributing valuable information to the study of linguistics, but I have to ask how it affects their relationship with their kid when he realizes that he was a test subject for his whole childhood, that 80% of said childhood is on tape, and all without his informed consent. That kid is going to have ISSUES.
(h/t Engadget)
April 24th, 2008 at 07:40pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Science,
Weirdness
Why do they hate America?
With little fanfare, a small number of prominent academic scientists have made a decision that was until recently all but unheard of. They decided to stop accepting payments from food, drug and medical device companies.
No longer will they be paid for speaking at meetings or for sitting on advisory boards. They may still work with companies. It is important, they say, for knowledgeable scientists to help companies draw up and interpret studies. But the work will be pro bono.
The scientists say their decisions were private and made with mixed emotions. In at least one case, the choice resulted in significant financial sacrifice. While the investigators say they do not want to appear superior to their colleagues, they also express relief. At last, they say, when they offer a heartfelt and scientifically reasoned opinion, no one will silently put an asterisk next to their name.
They are part of a group responding to accusations of ethical conflicts inherent in these arrangements, and their decisions repudiate decades of industry influence, says Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, a professor at the Tufts School of Medicine, who has written a book on conflicts of interest.
Five years ago, “nobody paid any attention to taking money from industry,” he said, adding: “They just took it. In some instances, I think people thought they were suckers if they didn’t.”
(…)
He attributes the change to publicity about conflicts and what can be almost a public shaming when researchers’ conflicts are published. “Finally, it’s gotten to people,” Dr. Kassirer said.
The story then provides three examples of researchers who voluntarily made this decision. One recoiled after being blasted by the blogosphere; another began to doubt his own objectivity; and the third said he got sick of seeing “Dr. Winer has accepted honoraria”.
I’m not sure it’s enough to make a difference yet, but it’s good to know that there are still some people out there with enough of a conscience to trade money for integrity. Bravo!
April 15th, 2008 at 07:13am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Corruption/Cronyism,
Science
NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Stickney Crater, on the Martian moon Phobos. Taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Wow.
April 10th, 2008 at 08:12pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science
NYT surveys the current state of Anasazi research:
Some 700 years ago, as part of a vast migration, a people called the Anasazi, driven by God knows what, wandered from the north to form settlements like these, stamping the land with their own unique style.
(…)
These Anasazi newcomers — archaeologists have traced them to the mesas and canyons around Kayenta, Ariz., not far from the Hopi reservation — were distinctive in other ways. They liked to build with stone (the Hohokam used sticks and mud), and their kivas, like those they left in their homeland, are unmistakable: rectangular instead of round, with a stone bench along the inside perimeter, a central hearth and a sipapu, or spirit hole, symbolizing the passage through which the first people emerged from mother earth.
“You could move this up to Hopi and not tell the difference,” said John A. Ware, the archaeologist leading the field trip, as he examined a Davis Ranch kiva. Finding it down here is a little like stumbling across a pagoda on the African veldt.
For five days in late February, Dr. Ware, the director of the Amerind Foundation, an archaeological research center in Dragoon, Ariz., was host to 15 colleagues as they confronted the most vexing and persistent question in Southwestern archaeology: Why, in the late 13th century, did thousands of Anasazi abandon Kayenta, Mesa Verde and the other magnificent settlements of the Colorado Plateau and move south into Arizona and New Mexico?
(…)
“Climate probably explains a lot,” Dr. Allison said. “But there are places where people could have stayed and farmed and chose not to.”
Some inhabitants left the relatively lush climes of what is now southern Colorado for the bone dry Hopi mesas. “Climate makes the most sense for this big pattern change,” Dr. Lipe said. “But then you think, So they went to Hopi to escape this?”
(…)
Soon after the abandonment, the drought lifted. “The tree-ring reconstructions show that at 1300 to 1340 it was exceedingly wet,” said Larry Benson, a paleoclimatologist with the Arid Regions Climate Project of the United States Geological Survey. “If they’d just hung in there . . .”
Though the rains returned, the people never did.
“Why didn’t they come back?” said Catherine M. Cameron, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado. “Why didn’t anyone come back to the northern San Juan? It was a fine place, and apparently by 1300 it was very fine.”
(…)
Ultimately the motivation for the abandonments may lie beyond fossils and artifacts, in the realm of ideology. Imagine trying to explain the 19th-century Mormon migration to Utah with only tree rings and pollen counts.
By studying changes in ceremonial architecture and pottery styles, Donna Glowacki, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, is charting the rise of what may have been a new puebloan religion. For more than a century, the established faith was distinguished by multistory “great houses,” with small interior kivas, and by much larger “great kivas” — round, mostly subterranean and covered with a sturdy roof. Originating at Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, the formidable temples seem designed to limit access to all but a priestly few.
Though Chaco declined as a regional religious center during the early 1100s, the same architecture spread to the Mesa Verde area. But by the mid 1200s, a different style was also taking hold, with plazas and kivas that were uncovered like amphitheaters — hints, perhaps, of a new openness. At some sites, serving bowls became larger and were frequently decorated with designs, as though intended for a ritual communion. If the pueblo people had left a written history perhaps we would read of the Anasazi equivalent of the Protestant reformation.
But the analogy can’t be pushed too far. The new architecture also included multiwalled edifices — some round, some D-shaped — that might have been chambers for secret rituals.
Though the dogma may be irrecoverable, Dr. Glowacki argues that it rapidly attracted adherents. A center of the movement, she said, was the McElmo Canyon area, west of Mesa Verde. Excavations indicate that the population burgeoned along with the new architecture. An influx of different pottery designs suggests immigrants from the west were moving in. Then around 1260, long before the drought, the residents began leaving the pueblo, perhaps spreading the new ideology.
Other archaeologists see evidence of an evangelical-like religion — the forerunner, perhaps, of the masked Kachina rituals, which still survive on the Hopi and Zuni reservations — appearing in the south and attracting the rebellious northerners. Salado polychrome pottery may have been emblematic of another, possibly overlapping cult.
In an effort to draw together the skein of causes and effects, Dr. Kohler and members of the Village Ecodynamics Project are collaborating with archaeologists at Crow Canyon on a computer simulation of population changes in southwest Colorado from 600 to around 1300. Juxtaposing data on rainfall, temperature, soil productivity, human metabolic needs and diet, gleaned from an analysis of trash heaps and human waste, the model suggests a sobering conclusion: As Anasazi society became more complex, it also became more fragile.
Corn was domesticated and then wild turkeys, an important protein source. With more to eat, the populations grew and aggregated into villages. Religious and political institutions sprung up.
When crops began dying and violence increased, the inhabitants clustered even closer. By the time the drought of 1275 hit, the Anasazi had become far more dependent on agriculture than during earlier droughts. And they had become more dependent on each other.
Fascinating. Although it still doesn’t explain why they didn’t move back when the drought ended.
April 8th, 2008 at 07:31am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science,
Weirdness
I just saw this over at Kung Fu Monkey. Incredible if true:
Three years ago, Lee Spievack sliced off the tip of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane.
What happened next, Andrews reports, propelled him into the future of medicine. Spievack’s brother, Alan, a medical research scientist, sent him a special powder and told him to sprinkle it on the wound.
“I powdered it on until it was covered,” Spievack recalled.
To his astonishment, every bit of his fingertip grew back.
“Your finger grew back,” Andrews asked Spievack, “flesh, blood, vessels and nail?”
“Four weeks,” he answered.
Andrews spoke to Dr. Steven Badylak of the University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine and asked if that powder was the reason behind Spievack’s new finger tip.
“Yes, it is,” Badylak explained. “We took this and turned it into a powdered form.”
That powder is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine.
“It tells the body, start that process of tissue regrowth,” said Badylak.
Badlayk is one of the many scientists who now believe every tissue in the body has cells which are capable of regeneration. All scientists have to do is find enough of those cells and “direct” them to grow.
“Somehow the matrix summons the cells and tell them what to do,” Badylak explained. “It helps instruct them in terms of where they need to go, how they need to differentiate - should I become a blood vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever.”
If this helped Spievack’s finger regrow, Badylak says, at least in theory, you should be able to grow a whole limb.
I sure hope so. I wonder if there’s a time limit on how soon after the injury the Magickal Regenerating Pixie Dust has to be sprinkled on the wound.
March 31st, 2008 at 06:55am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science,
Weirdness
EIROforum/CERN
OMG WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!
The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.
Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe’s CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there’s no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they’re bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.
(…)
Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked…: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into “strangelets” that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?
Former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner has been raising such questions for years - first about an earlier-generation “big bang machine” known as the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, and more recently about the LHC.
Last Friday, Wagner and another critic of the LHC’s safety measures, Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit in Hawaii’s U.S. District Court. The suit calls on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to ease up on their LHC preparations for several months while the collider’s safety was reassessed.
(…)
The defense attorneys would likely dwell on the regulatory and procedural questions rather than the worries over a cosmic catastrophe. Those worries have been around for years, and most physicists have scoffed at them for almost as long. The doomsday scenarios raised by Sancho and Wagner include:
o Runaway black holes: Some physicists say the LHC could create microscopic black holes that would hang around for just a tiny fraction of a second and then decay. Sancho and Wagner worry that millions of black holes might somehow persist and coalesce into a compact gravitational mass that would draw in other matter and grow bigger. That’s pure science fiction, said Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York. “These black holes don’t live very long, and they have microscopic energy, and so they are harmless,” he told me.
o Strangelets: Smashing protons together at high enough energies could create new combinations of quarks, the particles that protons are made of. Sancho and Wagner worry that a nasty combination known as a stable, negatively charged strangelet could theoretically turn everything it touches into strangelets as well. Kaku compared this to the ancient myth of the Midas touch. “We see no evidence of this bizarre theory,” he said. “Once in a while, we trot it out to scare the pants off people. But it’s not serious.”
o Magnetic monopoles: One theory suggests that high-energy particle collisions might give rise to massive particles that have only one magnetic pole - only north, or only south, but not the north-south magnetism that dominates nature. Sancho and Wagner worry that such particles could be created in the LHC and start a runaway reaction that converts atoms into other forms of matter. But physicists have seen no evidence of such reactions, which should have occurred already as the result of more energetic cosmic-ray collisions in Earth’s upper atmosphere.
This all sounds alarmingly like one of those cheesy Saturday movies on the Sci-Fi Channel. The Collider even looks a little bit like the doomsday machine in that old Star Trek episode.
Ah well, the universe is probably better off without us anyway…
March 28th, 2008 at 11:51am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Science,
Weirdness
This is pretty incredible timing:
NASA has detected the brightest cosmic explosion ever recorded — a massive burst of energy 7.5 billion light years away that could be seen with the naked eye from Earth, the space agency said.
The explosion, a gamma ray burst older than Earth itself, was monitored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Swift satellite and shattered the record for the most distant object seen without visual aid.
“No other known object or type of explosion could be seen by the naked eye at such an immense distance,” said Swift team member Stephen Holland of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“If someone just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time, they saw the most distant object ever seen by human eyes without optical aid.”
Gamma ray bursts are among the most violent phenomenon produced in the universe. NASA described them as the most luminous explosions since the “Big Bang.”
(…)
The explosion seen Wednesday “blows away every gamma ray burst we’ve seen so far,” said Neil Gehrels of Goddard Space Flight Center.
Gamma ray bursts occur when huge stars use up all their fuel and their core collapses, forming black holes or neutron stars that release bursts of gamma rays, ejecting particles into space at nearly the speed of light and generating afterglows.
The burst, named GRB 080319B, was among a record four bursts detected by Swift on Wednesday, the same day of the death of prolific science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke who wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“Coincidentally, the passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the universe ablaze with gamma ray bursts,” said Swift team member Judith Racusin of Penn State University.
Even the universe mourns Arthur C. Clarke’s death, by catastrophically blowing up four stars at just the right time so their gamma rays would reach Earth on the same day Clarke died. That is a lot awesome.
March 22nd, 2008 at 02:05pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Books,
Coolness,
Science
This is a nice companion piece to the great story about the entangled humpback whale thanking the divers who freed her:
A dolphin guided two stranded whales to safety after human attempts to keep the animals off a New Zealand beach failed, a conservation official said Wednesday.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this before, it was amazing,” Conservation Department officer Malcolm Smith said.
The actions of the dolphin, well known locally for playing with swimmers at Mahia beach on the east coast of the North Island, probably meant the difference between life and death for the whales, Smith said.
Smith had been working for over an hour and a half to save the two pygmy sperm whales which had repeatedly become stranded despite his attempts to push them back out to sea.
A bottlenose dolphin, named Moko by locals, appeared and guided the whales to safety after apparently communicating with them, Smith said.
The whales, a 10-foot female and her male calf, were apparently confused by a sandbar just off the beach and could not find their way back to open water.
Smith had been alerted at daybreak on Monday by a neighbor about the two stranded whales on Mahia beach near his home.
“Over the next hour and a half I pushed them back out to sea two or three times and they were very reluctant to move offshore,” Smith said.
“I was starting to get cold and wet and they were becoming tired. I was reaching the stage where I was thinking it’s about time to give up here, I’ve done as much as I can.”
In that situation, whales are often humanely killed to end their suffering.
Smith said Moko arrived on the scene and he could hear the whales and the dolphin making noises, apparently to one another.
“The whales made contact with the dolphin and she basically escorted them about 200 yards parallel with the beach to the edge of the sandbar.
“Then she did a right-angle turn through quite a narrow channel and escorted them out to sea.
“There’s been no sign of the whales since Monday, they haven’t re-stranded.”
“What the communication was I do not know, and I was not aware dolphins could communicate with pygmy sperm whales, but something happened that allowed Moko to guide those two whales to safety.”
Moko has become famous for her antics at Mahia, which include playing in the surf with swimmers, approaching boats to be patted and pushing kayaks through the water with her snout.
That’s amazing - Moko rules. I would love to know what kind of communication there was between the dolphin and the whales. I don’t think they have a common language, and their gesturing capabilities are pretty limited. Possibly the whales were more inclined to trust and follow someone who looked and sounded more like themselves, and clearly knew how to navigate the shallow water.
March 14th, 2008 at 11:13pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science
Ellroon was right!
Squirrels may be small and furry, but they’re also clever tricksters, suggests a new study that describes how eastern grey squirrels engage in behavioral, and perhaps even tactical, deception.
The study is the first to present evidence that any rodent deceives. It’s also one of the first to document deception in the wild, since most other related studies have been conducted on captive critters.
The free-living squirrels mislead to protect their stashes of nuts and acorns, which they store, or cache, for later consumption. When storing food, they first excavate a shallow pit that they dig with their front paws.
Then, with the food in their mouths, the industrious squirrels push the item into the base of the pit “often with several thrusts of the entire body.” Finally, they drag their paws over the site to cover it with soil and debris.
Scientists, however, noticed that the squirrels would turn their backs on other squirrels and go through the whole storage ritual without even dropping food into the holes.
(…)
Co-author Sylvia Halkin then led a second experiment on the campus of Central Connecticut State University. In the experiment, one person provided the squirrels with peanuts, a second monitored squirrel behavior and a third person actually pilfered nuts from the rodents.
(…)
When the squirrels detected the human peanut pilfering, they initiated their deceptive behavior by covering sites where no food had been stored. They also made more of an effort to cache nuts in more remote places, such as under bushes and in tree nests, stumps or cavities. They even resorted to eating nuts rather than storing them.
The squirrels did such a good job at digging fake storage holes that they often tricked the human pilferers, who had trouble finding the peanuts. Other squirrels, even with their heightened sense of smell, can also be foiled by the deception.
(…)
Lisa Leaver, a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Exeter, said no one has yet proven that squirrels can understand the intentions of others, which would mean that they possess “theory of mind,” so she thinks it’s possible squirrels simply act based on trial and error.
[Lead author Michael] Steele, however, suspects that squirrels are indeed tactical deceivers. He hopes future research will confirm these suspicions that he and many a bird-feeding homeowner have.
No squirrels have been observed running for public office… yet.
February 21st, 2008 at 07:55pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Science,
Weirdness
SUNY-Stony Brook
Beelzebufo!
A frog the size of a bowling ball, with heavy armor and teeth, lived among dinosaurs millions of years ago — intimidating enough that scientists who unearthed its fossils dubbed the beast Beelzebufo, or Devil Toad.
But its size — 10 pounds and 16 inches long — isn’t the only curiosity. Researchers discovered the creature’s bones in Madagascar. Yet it seems to be a close relative of normal-sized frogs who today live half a world away in South America, challenging assumptions about ancient geography.
The discovery, led by paleontologist David Krause at New York’s Stony Brook University, was published Monday by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This frog, if it has the same habits as its living relatives in South America, was quite voracious,” Krause said. “It’s even conceivable that it could have taken down some hatchling dinosaurs.”
Awesome. All hail the Devil Toad.
February 19th, 2008 at 08:29pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science,
Weirdness
Olivia Judson ponders how best to commemorate the shared birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln:
I considered observing their joint birthday with a discussion of slave making in ants, but rejected that idea in favor of another.
You see, it’s almost Valentine’s Day, so she decided to speculate on the sex life of the tyrannosaurus instead. Ah, romance.
I want to take a journey 68 million years back in time to see a Tyrannosaurus rex couple mating. What was it like? Did they trumpet and bellow and stamp their feet? Did they thrash their enormous tails? Did he bite her neck in rapture and exude a musky scent? Somehow, I imagine that when two T. rex got it on, the earth shook for miles around.
And if I could only take this journey, I could answer a question that sometimes bothers me. Did T. rex have a penis? Did he even, as lizards do, have two?
(…)
The reason we don’t know whether T. rex had one is that the organ is generally too soft to leave a fossil trace. (There’s an exception to this: some mammals have a bone in their penis, the os penis or baculum. This can fossilize. Humans are unusual among primates in not having one; in case you’re wondering, it’s not clear whether the bone plays a role in maintaining erections.)
(…)
Moreover, whether a male has a penis at all varies from one group to the next. Male salamanders, for instance, don’t: they deposit sperm on the ground and the female collects it. Among birds, penises are rare: ostriches, emus, ducks, geese and swans are among the few. The rest just have a cloaca - an all-purpose opening also used for urination, defecation and, in the female, laying eggs. To copulate, two birds bring their cloacae together in what’s called a cloacal kiss.
I am so turned on right now.
Anyway, her guess is that male tyrannosaurs did have penises, because their closest living relatives, crocodiles and primitive birds (ostriches, emus, rheas, cassowaries, kiwis and tinamous) did. As to what kind of penis, I guess we’ll never know, unless we get lucky and find a fossilized one, or some miraculously preserved T. rex porn.
February 13th, 2008 at 09:00pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Quotes,
Science
I kinda thought I had written this post already, but now Clive Thompson has gone and beaten me to it:
If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best - and perhaps only - place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.
From where I sit, traditional “literary fiction” has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting - well - bored.
Why? I think it’s because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, “OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.” I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again.
(…)
…[Science fiction] authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds - so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?
This is exactly why I love sci-fi and have so much trouble reading regular fi - I’m fascinated by the universes that the writers create. The what-ifs, the concepts, the richness and complexity and otherness of it.
I’ve read stories where people can create specialized one-day duplicates of themselves whose memories they can download before the duplicates expire (Kiln People); where everyone’s brain is backed up to a hard drive and can be re-inserted into a new “sleeve” if they die (Altered Carbon); where entropy works in reverse so that everything improves with use (The Practice Effect); where intelligent spaceships pose frozen passengers in historical dioramas (Excession); where aliens spell out messages with human pimples (oops, that was the Weekly World News). And I’ve already gone on at length about Queen Of Angels.
A finely-crafted universe is a compelling character unto itself.
January 25th, 2008 at 10:26pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Books,
Science,
Technology
Steve Yanoviak/Univ. of Arkansas
Proving once again that nature can be very strange and diabolical:
To perpetuate its life cycle, a newly identified parasite morphs its ant victims to such a degree that the infected ants resemble red, ripe juicy berries that birds are more inclined to pick, according to the University of California at Berkeley.
Eggs from the parasite then pass through the unwitting birds when they defecate. Ants consume the waste, become infected, and the whole cycle starts anew.
The transformation from black ant to red berry form represents the world’s first known example of fruit mimicry caused by a parasite. In this case, the victimizer is a parasitic nematode, or roundworm.
(…)
Yanoviak and his team observed that infected ants hold their berry-ish bellies in an elevated position, which is an alarm posture in ants. Hauling around such a blob also makes the ants sluggish. Like ripe fruit, the gaster easily breaks off, so the combination of effects makes the “berry” easy for birds to pluck.
Normally, birds avoid consuming ants because they taste awful, they sting, have spines and possess a hard exoskeleton. The effort simply isn’t worth the minimal nutrition ants could provide for birds in high canopy tropical forests ranging from Central America to the lowland Amazon, where the ant-to-berry phenomenon plays out on a daily basis.
The parasites even seem to make the ants more palatable to the birds, which think they are eating a berry from a Hyeronima tree, or one of the many other types of red berries found in tropical forests of the region.
“Infected ants seem to produce much less nasty pheromones,” explained Yanoviak, who co-authored a paper on the new parasite with colleague George Poinar Jr., the world’s authority on nematodes that parasitize insects….
(…)
Steve Heydon, curator and collections manager at the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California at Davis, told Discovery News that “quite a few parasites do weird things to their hosts.”
He shared how one trematode parasite actually exerts a sort of mind control over certain ants, causing the ants to climb up grass stalks, clamp on and basically wait to be eaten. The consumer then poops and starts the trematode’s life cycle again.
An even more unusual process affects snails, according to Heydon.
“Parasites can infect certain snails, causing their eyestalks to change color, swell and snap off,” he said.
Like the bug in a Mexican jumping bean, the parasites in the snail eyes then cause the eyes “to wiggle, which attracts fish that eat them, allowing the parasite to move into its next life cycle stage.”
You know, that worm’s life cycle kinda reminds me of something…
January 17th, 2008 at 10:51pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Science,
Weirdness
Today’s two-fer is from last week’s Wild Side blog/column by Olivia Judson.
(Disclaimer: Ms. Judson was in the same dorm complex my freshman year, and I thought she was very sweet. So the selection process may not be entirely unbiased today. Take it up with my ombudsman.)
The first quote is actually from Alfred Russel Wallace, who Darwin beat to the punch on publishing a theory of evolution:
If this [scientific investigation of tropical ecosystems] is not done, future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve; and while professing to regard every living thing as the direct handiwork and best evidence of a Creator, yet, with a strange inconsistency, seeing many of them perish irrecoverably from the face of the earth, uncared for and unknown.
Still timely after 145 years.
The second quote is just alarming on multiple levels:
Every year, then, most blue tits die.
Egad.
January 17th, 2008 at 09:24pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Environment,
Quotes,
Science
How cool is this?
In preparing for the experiment, Idoya was trained to walk upright on a treadmill. She held onto a bar with her hands and got treats — raisins and Cheerios — as she walked at different speeds, forward and backward, for 15 minutes a day, 3 days a week, for 2 months.
Meanwhile, electrodes implanted in the so-called leg area of Idoya’s brain recorded the activity of 250 to 300 neurons that fired while she walked. Some neurons became active when her ankle, knee and hip joints moved. Others responded when her feet touched the ground. And some fired in anticipation of her movements.
To obtain a detailed model of Idoya’s leg movements, the researchers also painted her ankle, knee and hip joints with fluorescent stage makeup and, using a special high speed camera, captured her movements on video.
The video and brain cell activity were then combined and translated into a format that a computer could read. This format is able to predict with 90 percent accuracy all permutations of Idoya’s leg movements three to four seconds before the movement takes place.
On Thursday, an alert and ready-to-work Idoya stepped onto her treadmill and began walking at a steady pace with electrodes implanted in her brain. Her walking pattern and brain signals were collected, fed into the computer and transmitted over a high-speed Internet link to a robot in Kyoto, Japan.
The robot, called CB for Computational Brain, has the same range of motion as a human. It can dance, squat, point and “feel” the ground with sensors embedded in its feet, and it will not fall over when shoved.
Designed by the Sarcos Research Corporation in Salt Lake City, the robot was chosen for the experiment because of its extraordinary ability to mimic human locomotion.
As Idoya’s brain signals streamed into CB’s actuators, her job was to make the robot walk steadily via her own brain activity. She could see the back of CB’s legs on an enormous movie screen in front of her treadmill and received treats if she could make the robot’s joints move in synchrony with her own leg movements.
As Idoya walked, CB walked at exactly the same pace. Recordings from Idoya’s brain revealed that her neurons fired each time she took a step and each time the robot took a step.
(…)
An hour into the experiment, the researchers pulled a trick on Idoya. They stopped her treadmill. Everyone held their breath. What would Idoya do?
“Her eyes remained focused like crazy on CB’s legs,” Dr. Nicolelis said.
She got treats galore. The robot kept walking. And the researchers were jubilant.
When Idoya’s brain signals made the robot walk, some neurons in her brain controlled her own legs, whereas others controlled the robot’s legs. The latter set of neurons had basically become attuned to the robot’s legs after about an hour of practice and visual feedback.
Idoya cannot talk but her brain signals revealed that after the treadmill stopped, she was able to make CB walk for three full minutes by attending to its legs and not her own.
Vision is a powerful, dominant signal in the brain, Dr. Nicolelis said. Idoya’s motor cortex, where the electrodes were implanted, had started to absorb the representation of the robot’s legs — as if they belonged to Idoya herself.
Now if they can just figure out a way to work ninjas, pirates, and Vikings into the experiment, it will be The Most Awesome Thing Ever.
January 17th, 2008 at 07:21am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science,
Technology
This may very well be the most bizarre theory I have ever seen:
The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agrees this overabundance is absurd, pointed out that some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.” Welcome to what physicists call the Boltzmann brain problem, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who suggested the mechanism by which such fluctuations could happen in a gas or in the universe. Cosmologists also refer to them as “freaky observers,” in contrast to regular or “ordered” observers of the cosmos like ourselves. Cosmologists are desperate to eliminate these freaks from their theories, but so far they can’t even agree on how or even on whether they are making any progress.
(…)
The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating, making galaxies fly away from one another faster and faster. If the leading dark-energy suspect, a universal repulsion Einstein called the cosmological constant, is true, this runaway process will last forever, and distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another. Being in such a space would be like being surrounded by a black hole.
Rather than simply going to black like “The Sopranos” conclusion, however, the cosmic horizon would glow, emitting a feeble spray of elementary particles and radiation, with a temperature of a fraction of a billionth of a degree, courtesy of quantum uncertainty. That radiation bath will be subject to random fluctuations just like Boltzmann’s eternal universe, however, and every once in a very long, long time, one of those fluctuations would be big enough to recreate the Big Bang. In the fullness of time this process could lead to the endless series of recurring universes. Our present universe could be part of that chain.
In such a recurrent setup, however, Dr. Susskind of Stanford, Lisa Dyson, now of the University of California, Berkeley, and Matthew Kleban, now at New York University, pointed out in 2002 that Boltzmann’s idea might work too well, filling the megaverse with more Boltzmann brains than universes or real people.
In the same way the odds of a real word showing up when you shake a box of Scrabble letters are greater than a whole sentence or paragraph forming, these “regular” universes would be vastly outnumbered by weird ones, including flawed variations on our own all the way down to naked brains, a result foreshadowed by Martin Rees, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, in his 1997 book, “Before the Beginning.”
The conclusions of Dr. Dyson and her colleagues were quickly challenged by Andreas Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo of the University of California, Davis, who used an alternate approach. They found that the Big Bang was actually more likely than Boltzmann’s brain.
“In the end, inflation saves us from Boltzmann’s brain,” Dr. Albrecht said, while admitting that the calculations were contentious. Indeed, the “invasion of Boltzmann brains,” as Dr. Linde once referred to it, was just beginning.
In an interview Dr. Linde described these brains as a form of reincarnation. Over the course of eternity, he said, anything is possible. After some Big Bang in the far future, he said, “it’s possible that you yourself will re-emerge. Eventually you will appear with your table and your computer.”
But it’s more likely, he went on, that you will be reincarnated as an isolated brain, without the baggage of stars and galaxies. In terms of probability, he said, “It’s cheaper.”
Craziness. And I’ve only excerpted maybe a quarter of the whole thing.
I have to say, if I really am a spontaneously-formed random electric brain floating in space, and everything else is a figment of my imagination, then I must be a helluva lot smarter and more creative than I ever thought possible.
January 15th, 2008 at 11:35am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Science,
Weirdness
Who knew sperm were so useful? I mean for… other things:
Scientists have taken the first steps in reproducing the biological engine that powers a sperm’s tail and modified it for use in nano-sized devices.
The tiny biological machine is something like a car engine that uses fuel to generate motion.
Only this machine — composed of 10 carefully arranged enzymes — runs on natural sugars, using them to produce an high-energy molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP for short.
In the case of sperm, ATP energizes the tail. But it could also be used in nanorobots that do everything from activate drug-delivery pumps to manufacture missing enzymes necessary for healthy bodily functions.
“We’re taking what sperm have already figured out how to do and using it for a nanotechnology application,” said Alex Travis, assistant professor of reproductive biology at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, NY.
(…)
So far, they have attached three of the 10 enzymes — two that are next to each other and one from the middle of the sequence. When attached, the enzymes activate and perform their normal function. If the scientists can get all 10 enzymes to work in sequence, they’ll have their biological engine. Blood glucose naturally present in the body would be used as fuel.
Of course, the nightmare scenario would be if a whole bunch of these little machines were combined into an unstoppable futuristic killer robot, sent back in time by the machines to destroy the leader of the human rebellion. It would be called… well, I think you know what it’d be called.
December 28th, 2007 at 09:16pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science,
Technology,
Weirdness
No, this isn’t about them being smarter than college students, but rather about their amazing medicinal instincts:
Ugandan and French scientists have for months been observing the behavior of a group of chimpanzees whose uncanny aptitude for self-medication could help their human cousins discover new drugs.
The great apes’ ability to treat ailments by adjusting their diet has long been observed by scientists, including world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall, but a project in Uganda’s Kibale forest offers a unique opportunity for pharmaceutical research.
(…)
Uganda is an ideal research ground for the scientists’ double mission of better understanding the chimps’ behavior and using them as guides towards new molecules — and potentially new drugs.
(…)
The key moment in the observation is when one among the group of around 50 chimps… gets sick.
The primate’s choice of food — what he pulls out of his medicine chest — is packed with information that could lead the scientists to new discoveries.
“We want to compare which plants are used by the traditional healers or traditional practitioners, and the medicines used by chimpanzees. Is there a relation for the kind of treatment they go for?,” [Ugandan botanics professor John] Kasenene said.
(…)
[French veterinary professor Sabrina] Krief explained how a chimp named Yogi, suffering from intestinal worms, ingested Aneilema aequinoctiale leaves in the morning and Albizia grandibracteata bark in the evening.
Such plants have been used in traditional medicine in some areas and the Kibale team later confirmed through in vitro testing that they acted against parasites.
Another male chimpanzee who had been feverish and weak was observed eating only Trichilia rubescens leaves for a whole day.
The plants’ molecules, later isolated by the scientists in a laboratory, were found to be effective against malaria.
“These findings have allowed us to discover new plant molecules with significant properties against malaria, worms or tumours,” Krief said.
(…)
“What is surprising to me is that these chimps have no chemist, no lab… They simply move in and collect plants and eventually find themselves getting cured,” [botanical researcher Dennis Kamoga] marvelled. “It’s a proof that they are very close to us.”
(…)
“It’s quite rare to find active molecules but especially new molecules which might put us on the path to developing new pharmaceuticals,” which is the ultimate goal of the project, Krief said.
The French scientist said she hoped that, while advancing medicine for humans, the research project in Kibale could also contribute to “a better understanding and protection of the flora and the great apes” in the forest, both of which include critically endangered species.
I wonder if it’s learned behavior, or if it’s purely instinctive. If it’s learned, then they’re carefully observing and remembering what other chimps do when they get sick. I wonder how they figured it out in the first place, though - perhaps one chimp happened to eat one of those medicinal plants when they were sick, started feeling better, and made the connection that they felt better because of what they ate.
Pretty fascinating either way.
December 21st, 2007 at 07:09am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science
Maybe I need to start checking out the iTunes U…
Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.
Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.
(…)
Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store.
In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Professor Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet - nerd safari garb - he fires a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall.
He rides a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off.
He was No. 1 on the most downloaded list at iTunes U for a while, but that lineup constantly evolves. The stars this week included Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind, a professor of quantum mechanics at Stanford.
Last week, Yale put some of its most popular undergraduate courses and professors online free. The list includes Controversies in Astrophysics with Charles Bailyn, Modern Poetry with Langdon Hammer and Introduction to the Old Testament with Christine Hayes.
(…)
With his wiry grayish-brown hair, his tortoiseshell glasses and his intensity, Professor Lewin is the iconic brilliant scientist. But like Julia Child, he is at once larger than life and totally accessible.
“We have here the mother of all pendulums!” he declares, hoisting his 6-foot-2, 170-pound self on a 30-pound steel ball attached to a pendulum hanging from the ceiling. He swings across the stage, holding himself nearly horizontal as his hair blows in the breeze he created.
The point: that a period of a pendulum is independent of the mass - the steel ball, plus one professor - hanging from it.
“Physics works!” Professor Lewin shouts, as the classroom explodes in cheers.
(…)
A fan who said he was a physics teacher from Iraq gushed: “You are now my Scientific Father. In spite of the bad occupation and war against my lovely IRAQ, you made me love USA because you are there and MIT is there.”
(…)
Chasing rainbows hooked Mr. Boigon, the San Diego florist. He was vacationing in Hawaii when he noticed the rainbow outside his hotel every afternoon. Why were the colors always in the same order?
When he returned home, Mr. Boigon said in a telephone interview, he Googled rainbows. Within moments, he was whisked to M.I.T. Lecture Hall No. 26-100. Professor Lewin was in front of a few hundred students.
“All of you have looked at rainbows,” he begins. “But very few of you have ever seen one. Seeing is different than looking. Today we are going to see a rainbow.”
For 50 minutes, he bounds across the stage, writing equations on the blackboard and rhapsodizing about the “amazing” and “beautiful” physics of rainbows. He explains how the colors always appear in the same order because of how light refracts and reflects in the water droplets.
For the finale, he creates a rainbow by shining a bright light into a glass sphere containing a single drop of water.
“There it is!” Professor Lewin cries.
“Your life will never be the same,” he tells his students. “Because of your knowledge, you will be able to see way more than just the beauty of the bows that everyone else can see.”
I loved teachers like this when I was in high school and college; sadly, there were precious few of them.
December 19th, 2007 at 07:33am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science
This really is pretty awesome:
About 34,000 years ago, a herd of mammoths found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time. Analysis of seven tusks, purchased from a Canadian fossils vendor, show the ancient beasts were blasted by an exploding meteor.
“The only reasonable explanation is that a meteor exploded somewhere near where these animals were standing,” Richard Firestone, a nuclear analytical chemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
Scientists aren’t sure if the animals died from their wounds, although the populations of several ice-age beasts decreased dramatically at about the same time of the suspected meteor strike. At least one creature, a bison, did survive, as its skull shows bone grew in after a fragment embedded, Firestone said.
“It was certainly a bad day,” he said.
(…)
After sifting through thousands of tusks at a Phoenix, Ariz., fossil show, he found one with a burnt hole in it and tested it with a magnet, as many meteors contain iron.
The magnet stuck. West bought the tusk for $200 and asked to look through the company’s warehouse, which contained another 15,000 fossils. He found more evidence of micrometeorite impacts in a batch of tusks from eastern Siberia.
Some of the tusks had hundreds of tiny holes, made by burning fragments of the exploded meteor. The punctures all face the same direction, consistent with a blast from the sky.
Analysis by Firestone and colleagues confirmed that fragments in the tusks had high nickel-to-iron ratios and little titanium, indicating the shards probably did not come from Earth.
“We think the meteor exploded several miles up in the air, sending shrapnel in all directions,” Firestone said. “Anything lying underneath it was likely to be injured or killed.”
(…)
The researchers hope museums, universities and private foundations will look through their collections of mammoth tusks and bones for signs of meteorite impacts. They also are looking at a meteor impact site in Canada that may be the source of the shards that pierced the mammoths. That meteor would have been about 550 yards in diameter.
Well, I suppose it’s not so awesome if you’re one of the mammoths’ family members. A respectful moment of silence, if you please.
December 18th, 2007 at 11:48pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Science
We have found the dumbest person on Earth.
Yes, that’s right: Christianity pre-dates everything. Perhaps even the Old Testament!
This is the same woman who is so busy trying to figure out how to feed her family on her measly six-figure (seven-figure?) salary, that she can’t even contemplate inconsequential trifles like whether or not the Earth is flat.
The mind is too stunned to even reel.
(h/t Caro Kay)
December 5th, 2007 at 08:38pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Media,
Religion,
Republicans,
Science,
TV
But not as much as a spoon…
China displayed the first image of the moon captured by its Chang-e 1 lunar probe at a gala ceremony Monday, marking the formal start of the satellite’s mission to document the lunar landscape.
Unveiling the image at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, Premier Wen Jiabao hailed it as a major step in ”the Chinese race’s 1,000-year-old dream” of exploring the moon.
China hopes the probe, launched late last month, will have surveyed the entire surface of the moon at least once by early next year.
The probe’s launch closely followed the start of a similar mission by Japan, prompting speculation over a new space race in Asia. India plans to launch a lunar probe in April.
China has wanted to explore the moon for 1,000 years? Jeez, talk about a long-term plan.
November 27th, 2007 at 08:29pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Science,
Technology
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