Technology
gregladen | October 5, 2012I usually avoid writing about research that has not been done yet. I get press releases every day about grants awarded to universities and private companies to pursue one research project or another. There is always some reason those grants are awarded, some prior research that indicates a potential finding. The early indications of what could happen in combination with the verification of wonderfulness of the research team demonstrated by six or seven figures of dollars being provided to develop the work results in a press release with promise. The thing is, the potential results often…
catdynamics | October 5, 2012In which we win an award from the New Frontiers in Astronomy Program.
The New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology program announced its research grant award winners yesterday.
The last, but not least of the Big Questions solicited in the Call for Proposals, was:Are we alone in the universe? Or, are there other life and intelligence beyond the solar system?
There were four awards in this "Astrobiology and SETI" category, focusing on different approaches in the search for life elsewhere in the Universe.
We got one:
"Constraining the Abundance of Kardashev Type II and III Civilizations From…
lborkowski | September 19, 2012The New York Times has a terrific graphic that plots the number of auto fatalities per 100,000 people and the vehicle miles driven per capita from 1950 to 2011. Overall, we're driving far more vehicle-miles per capita and seeing far fewer auto deaths than we were six decades ago, but this hasn't happened in a linear fashion. Rather, as Hannah Fairfield explains, change occurs unevenly:
Plotting the two most important variables against each other — miles traveled versus deaths per 100,000 population — yields a pattern that looks like a plateau followed by a steep drop. It evokes the theory of…
oracknows | September 16, 2012As part of my ongoing effort to make sure that I never run out of blogging material, I subscribe to a number of quack e-mail newsletters. In fact, sometimes I think I've probably overdone it. Every day, I get several notices and pleas from various wretched hives of scum and quackery, such as NaturalNews.com, Mercola.com, and various antivaccine websites. I think of it as my way of keeping my finger on the pulse of the antiscience and pseudoscience wing of medicine, but I must admit that I don't really read them all, but they do allow me to know what the quacks are selling and what new…
gregladen | September 13, 2012When I look at the Atari Arcade, I get a bunch of gobbledygook but if I click on individual links to individual games, I get an interesting experiment in HTML 5.0 demonstrating old fashioned character-based-graphic style games. Here are the links, but I suggest right-clicking and opening in a new window or tab so you can more cleanly shut them down if you get stuck. In other words, attempting to use the most advanced web-based programming language/markup tool to emulate ancient games is kind of like Dr. Who crossing his own time line and all sorts of bad things can happen.
The Atari Arcade…
gregladen | September 6, 2012The Twin Cities Metro Transit (which we voted some time ago to call "The T" but still haven't really started doing yet) has added a very cool bus to its fleet. It is Minnesota Made which is nice, and super efficient in part for reasons that I had not realized were important. From the T's web site:
Advanced engine and hybrid technology
Optimized onboard systems for improved efficiency
Reduced emissions from less time spent idling
Less idling + more efficiency = buses that run cleaner and pollute less
Unlike other buses, even some hybrids, the Xcelsior uses super efficient All Electric…
lborkowski | September 5, 2012By Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
The Journal of Public Health policy has just published my editorial “The CIA’s Vaccination Ruse” on an open-access basis on the journal’s website. The editorial deals with the CIA’s use of a sham vaccination program as a cover for spying operations in Pakistan. As I have studied vaccines and vaccine policy for almost forty years, The Pump Handle has invited me to provide its readers with some big-picture background on vaccines and vaccination policy in the US and around the world to accompany the link to my editorial.
School Entry Laws
In the 1970s, public health…
sporte | September 4, 2012If all the information you had about scientific careers came from newspapers or TV, it would be easy to think that everyone who works in life sciences / biotechnology is either a Ph.D. scientist, post-doc, or graduate student. In reality, the life sciences are more like an iceberg. The public sees the people at the top, with advanced degrees, while the many people who have bachelors or associates degrees are hidden from view.
The NIH has realized that a fair number of people they hire are community college graduates who have associate degrees in biotechnology. Many students from the…
esiegel | August 21, 2012"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -Isaac Asimov
One of the most spectacular and successful ideas of the 20th Century was Einstein's General Relativity, or the idea that matter and energy determines the curvature of spacetime, and the curvature of spacetime in turn determines how gravitation works.
Image credit: Hyper-Mathematics - Uzayzaman / Spacetime.
From the orbits of planets to the bending of starlight, General Relativity governs all gravitational phenomena in the Universe, and accurately describes every observation we've…
gregladen | August 10, 2012NASA did an amazing thing a few days ago, landing a big giant amazing Science Robot on the Angry Red Planet, Mars. But to get to that point, to have The Ultimate Omelette, as it were, you've got to break a few eggs.
Here is what an egg looks like when NASA breaks it:
It doesn't just sit there and burn...it keeps blowing up and stuff, so you may want to watch the whole video if you missed the Fourth of July.
This is/was the Morpheus Lander.
Morpheus is a vertical test bed vehicle demonstrating new green propellant propulsion systems and autonomous landing and hazard detection technology.…
esiegel | August 9, 2012"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." -Carl Sagan
Our night sky, quite literally, is our window to the Universe.
Image credit: Miloslav Druckmuller, Brno University of Technology.
Well, it's kind of a window to the Universe. I say only "kind of" because, with the exception of those two faint, fuzzy clouds in the lower right, everything else visible in the image above is part of our own Milky Way galaxy. In fact, practically…
oracknows | August 1, 2012Dying of cancer can be a horrible way to go, but as a cancer specialist I sometimes forget that there are diseases that are equally, if not more, horrible. One that always comes to mind is amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It is a motor neuron disease whose clinical course is characterized by progressive weakness, muscle atrophy and spasticity, with ultimate progression to respiratory muscles leading to difficulty breathing and speaking (dysarthria) and to the muscles controlling swallowing. The rate of clinical course is variable, often…
esiegel | July 26, 2012"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is just opinion." -Democritus of Abdera
When you take a look out at the Universe, past the objects in our own solar system, beyond the stars, dust and nebulae within our own galaxy, and out into the void of intergalactic space, what is it that you see?
Image credit: BRI composite-image of the FORS Deep Field, ESO, VLT.
What we normally think of as the entire Universe, consisting of hundreds of billions of galaxies, with about 8,700 identified in the tiny patch of deep-sky shown above. Each one of those galaxies, itself, contains…
pharyngula | July 25, 2012I had never heard of the Women in Space Program before, but apparently, after the Soviets sent Valentina Tereshkova into space, there was actually an effort to train American women as astronauts.
The participants of the Women in Space Program experienced tremendous success. "Nineteen women enrolled in WISP, undergoing the same grueling tests administered to the male Mercury astronauts," Brandon Keim wrote in 2009. "Thirteen of them -- later dubbed the Mercury 13 -- passed 'with no medical reservations,' a higher graduation rate than the first male class. The top four women scored as highly as…
gregladen | July 16, 2012We're getting closer to the Impossible Landing that NASA is going to attempt on Mars, and the space agency has sent out a new press release.
The area where NASA's Curiosity rover will land on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT) has a geological diversity that scientists are eager to investigate, as seen in this false-color map based on data from NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
NASA's most advanced planetary rover is on a precise course for an early August landing beside a Martian mountain to begin two years of unprecedented scientific detective work. However, getting…
cevans | July 10, 2012William Gibson, first in his novel Burning Chrome and then later in the seminal Neuromancer, both coined and defined "cyberspace" as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators." His novels predate the universal adoption of the World Wide Web as a communication matrix, and his psychedelic fantasy of cyberspace–a kind of semantic space navigated by users in virtual-reality, where information takes form as navigable structures–is not quite (yet) our web, but he was correct in his estimation of the network as a hallucination.
Most of us know, on some foggy…
gregladen | July 4, 2012And you too, computer, now that I think of it. I have a list here of things that are annoying that are similar to each other in that they interfere with my most basic use of the computer. Most of the time I demand very little of a computer. Writing text in a text editor or in the text boxes of web pages, and reading things. That is mostly what I do. It is astonishing that in 2012 when we are about to do this that these simple tasks can be thwarted by poor design and engineering in the software running on what is really pretty advanced hardware.
1) Reloading web pages. This is best…
oracknows | June 24, 2012I wondered how long it would take for someone critical of current cancer care to capitalize on the recently reported health misfortune of a celebrity. The answer, unfortunately, is "not long at all." I will admit, however, that the source of that use and abuse of the misfortune of a celebrity was not the usual suspect; i.e., Mike Adams, whom I've taken to task on many occasions for gloating over celebrity deaths and illnesses, such as those of Tony Snow, Patrick Swayze, and Elizabeth Edwards, as "evidence" that conventional medicine either doesn't work or kills.
The celebrity to whom I am…
catdynamics | June 24, 2012"Name one thing robots can't do in space that humans can!" was the challenge from a speaker at a meeting I attended many years ago.
"Have babies!" was the loud and prompt reply from a grad student friend of mine at the back, thereby winning the argument to great applause.
It is important to remember that while science and discovery is important, it is not the ontological basis for space exploration.
Space is, ultimately, about existential motivations. The science helps drive the motivation, and provides the information that enables space exploration, but is in many important ways not the…
catdynamics | June 22, 2012We know now that there are planets out there.
Lots and lots of planets.
We are still pinning down the exact incidence over all stellar populations, and we are barely at the point where we can directly confirm the presence of terrestrial planets, but if parameter space is smooth and the universe does not conspire against us, then terrestrial planets must be quite common.
10% incidence would not be a bad conservative guess, but I would not be surprised if the incidence is 30-50%.
We will know for sure soon.
We don't know how life starts.
We have some well founded suspicions, and every year the…