15 links tagged “science”

The name "Halo" sounds much catchier and should adorn the £4.4 billion experiment, according to a poll organised by the Royal Society of Chemistry in London The public have decided the Large Hadron Collider should have the catchier name Halo The Large Hadron Collider does what it says on the tin, since hadron refers to the subatomic particles that the giant machine smashes together at a shade below the speed of light. But this "fails to reflect the drama of its mission, or the inspiration it should be conveying to the wider public," says Dr Richard Pike, chief executive of the Society. The Society launched a competition to suggest an inspiring name for the 17 mile circumference machine, which is going to smash its first particles next week at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva, known by its French acronym Cern. After sifting more than 2,500 responses, ranging from The Big Banger to Infinite Devil Machine and The Matter Splatterer, it has now selected a winner to rechristen the vast enterprise. Fed up with "the contrived acronyms that plague the world of science," the RSC says it "picked a suggestion which is simple, memorable, and brings to mind the deserved grandeur of perhaps the most important experiment ever built." "Halo conjures visions of radiant beauty, power and wisdom. The circle of light reflects the collider's form; it is a crowning achievement of science and engineering. It also gives more than a nod to the experiment's importance to religious debate.

Those strange lights in the sky seem to move with unnatural precision, making turns and accelerations no human-made aircraft could possibly match. What ultra-advanced anti-gravity system allows UFOs to fly in such a bizarre way? Apparently it's ionized air. An engineering professor at the University of Florida has it all figured out, and he's going to build his own flying saucer. Professor Subrata Roy started working on his "wingless electromagnetic air vehicle" (WEAV) for NASA. The surface of the saucer-shaped craft will be covered with electrodes that, when powered by a battery or other power source, will ionize the surrounding air to create plasma. When charged with an electric current, the polarized plasma will repel the non-polarized air, creating lift and thrust. Such an aircraft would have very stable flight characteristics, with the pilot controlling it by diverting the electrical charge to different parts of the surface. Professor Roy thinks it could be scaled up to useful dimensions (his prototype will be about six inches across). I'd check out the professor's work while you still can. He's scheduled for a visit from a couple of guys in black suits tomorrow, after which his research will be republished in a heavily redacted form. Image by: Scientific American.

Feb. 13, 2008 -- German astronaut Hans Schlegel floated out of the International Space Station for his first spacewalk on Wednesday, two days after an illness forced the shuttle Atlantis crew member to skip an outing to install a new European lab.

Like X-rays let doctors see the bones beneath our skin, "T-rays" could let art historians see murals hidden beneath coats of plaster or paint in centuries-old buildings, University of Michigan engineering researchers say. T-rays, pulses of terahertz radiation, could also illuminate penciled sketches under paintings on canvas without harming the artwork, the researchers say.

DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn't be able to. Explanation: None, at least not yet. Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible. Even so, the research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals. Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current b...

This is from November '06...Again, just thought I'd mention it... By Patricia Reaney LONDON, Nov 22 (Reuters) - One person's DNA code can be as much as 10 percent different from another's, researchers said on Wednesday in a finding that questions the idea that everyone on Earth is 99.9 percent identical genetically. They said their new version of the human genetic map, or "book of life," fills in many missing pages and chapters to explain how genes are involved in common diseases. "This important work will help identify genetic causes of many diseases," Dr. Mark Walport, director of Britain's Wellcome Trust, said in a statement. Instead of showing single variations in human DNA that make people unique, the map looks at differences in duplications and deletions of large DNA segments known as copy number variants or CNVs, which can help explain why some people are susceptible to illnesses such as AIDS and others are not. "We're a patchwork of DNA sequences, gains and losses," Dr. Charles Lee of the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts told a news conference. Scientists from more than a dozen centers around the world identified about 3,000 genes with variations in the number of copies of specific DNA segments. The changes can affect gene activity, including susceptibility to diseases. The Human Genome Project mapped the billions of letters that make up the human genetic code. Scientists later refined the map by looking for single variations called SNPs or single nucleotide polymorphisms.

This is from November '06...Just thought I'd mention it... A genetic breakthrough could help clear up some long-standing mysteries surrounding our closest evolutionary relatives: the Neanderthals. Scientists have reconstructed a chunk of DNA from the genome of a Neanderthal man who lived 38,000 years ago. The genetic information they extracted from a thigh bone has allowed them to identify more than a million building blocks of Neanderthal DNA so far. Details of the efforts appear in the journals Nature and Science. "The sequence data will serve as a DNA time machine," said co-author Edward Rubin, from the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, US. Research will now extend to complete the whole genome of a Neanderthal Prof Chris Stringer, Natural History Museum "[It] will tell us about aspects of Neanderthal biology that we can never get from their bones and associated artefacts." Studying the Neanderthal genome will shed light on the genetic changes that made our species what it is

The Osaka-based Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) has developed a crowd-monitoring humanoid robot that recognizes when people are lost and helps them find their way. In a series of demonstrations conducted from January 22 to 24, a souped-up version of ATR’s Robovie humanoid robot monitored people as they passed through a 100 square meter (1,076 sq ft) section of the Universal Citywalk Osaka shopping center. Relying on data from 16 cameras, 6 laser range finders and 9 RFID tag readers installed in and around the area, the robot was able to watch up to 20 people at a time, pinpoint their locations to within a few centimeters, and classify each individual’s behavior into one of 10 categories (waiting, wandering, walking fast, running, etc.). In a series of demonstrations conducted from January 22 to 24,...

The ground beneath your feet contains energy, vast sums of energy. It has been estimated that in the U.S. alone the geothermal energy resources are enough to power the entire U.S. for 30,000 years. Yet, there are serious questions about geothermal ... via treehugger.com

Researchers have thawed ice estimated to be perhaps a million years old or more from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica using novel genomic techniques to determine how tiny, living "time capsules" survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold, and without food and energy from the sun. Lake Vostok is located beneath four kilometers of ice in East Antarctica. The lake is approximately 250 km long and 50 km wide. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleo-climatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for as long as 15 million years. Because of the long isolation, it's believed that Lake Vostok could contain new lifeforms, and unique geochemical processes. For five years, scientists in Russia and the United States have sought to probe the ancient lake to discover the secrets lying inside this pristine body of water...via The Daily Galaxy

One of our favorite shapes is the Sierpinski triangle. In one sense, a mere mathematical abstraction, on the other, a pattern that naturally emerges in real life from several different simple algorithms. On paper, one can play the Chaos Game to generate the shape (or cheat and just use the java applet). You can also generate a Sierpinski triangle in what is perhaps a more obvious way: by exploiting its fractal self-similarity. Beginning with a single triangle, replace that triangle with three half-size copies arranged so that their outer border form a new triangle of the same size as the original. Then, replace each of those three triangles with three triangles half that size, and so forth. (Turns out of course, that the fractal pattern is due to the algorithm of shrinking and positioning the shapes, not due to the fact that the initial shape that we began with was a triangle-- any plane figure can be used.) This algorithm is easy enough to implement directly and physically, using a flexible medium like polymer clay. Project instructions at the link.

Kokoro makes a variety of life-like robots including dinosaurs, animals, and humanoids. An "Air Servo System" allows the company to fit small servos throughout its line of Actroid humanoid robots (shown here) to make even their facial movements appear natural and realistic, according to the company. At the robotics show, they showed off a new version of the Actroid robots for use by dental students for practicing techniques. Credit: Kokoro

Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price. All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. [Of course, many might argue that the drug war succeeded, at least for a time, but that its goals were not publicly admitted, i.e. it was meant to "fail" for those who might benefit from such a scenario.]

This article in Harvard magazine explains that plants, animals and fungi are just a tiny part of the tree of life. The modern “tree of life,” based on genetic analysis, shows that the bulk of Earth’s biodiversity resides among the Archaea, Bacteria, and that portion of the Eukarya that does not include plants, animals, and fungi. Scientists had known that there are more microbes in an ounce of soil than humans alive on Earth, but that was just a measure of abundance. Pace’s discovery demonstrated something new, a previously unfathomed repository of biodiversity. Scientists began sequencing DNA from all sorts of environments. After looking at human gut microflora, they learned that each individual has his or her own characteristic set of a thousand species. “These represent three million genes that you carry,” points out Kolter, “as compared to the estimated 18,000 genes of the human genome. So you are living and exchanging [metabolites] constantly with a diverse pool of some three million genes.” Microbiologists continue to find new taxonomic divisions of microbes far faster than they can figure out how to culture them. http://www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/11/the-undiscovered-planet.html

This industrial robot, called Kuka, is busily writing out the full version of the Martin Luther bible by hand. Or I guess you’d say by robot arm, but it’s actually doing very precise calligraphy with a pen, putting my chicken scratch to shame. I think it’s pretty cool to see an industrial robot doing something so delicate and (okay, okay) beautiful. There are a few more photos available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcwathieu/sets/72157601299541354/