Science
Just added to Science Guide: PenguinScience
All about understanding penguin response to climate change.
NASA Images - Database of all NASA images, from the folks at Internet Archive.
NASA Turns 50 (Slide Show/Nature News).
Periodic Table of Videos (University of Nottingham)
Introducing the DelFly (a three gram dragonfly brought to you by the folks at Technical University of Delfts
Major discovery from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution.
The nature of glass is anything remains a mystery (NYT). It is well known that panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is a slow-moving liquid that flows downward over centuries. Well known, but wrong. Medieval stained glass makers were simply unable to make perfectly flat panes, and the windows were just as unevenly thick when new. The tale contains a grain of truth about glass resembling a liquid, however. The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid. But how can a liquid be as strikingly hard as glass? They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids,” said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. “They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle.” Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Princeton, wrote in 1995: “The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition.” He added, “This could be the next breakthrough in the coming decade.” Thirteen years later, scientists still disagree, with some vehemence, about the nature of glass. Peter G. Wolynes, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, thinks he essentially solved the glass problem two decades ago based on ideas of what glass would look like if cooled infinitely slowly.
Invisible magnetic fields, revealed. Then here’s the sun’s brilliant noise. (The sounds are VLF morning chorus and sferics) Want something non magnet related?
Looking for a sign? (ScientificAmerican) We Scientific Americans are emphatic empiricists. And although astronomy and astrology have common historical roots, the modern practice of astrology is total hooey. (And we say that only because we choose not to use stronger words than hooey in a family magazine.) Nevertheless, some staffers were recently musing about what a horoscope would look like in our august pages. (Or September, even.) So here’s a proof-of-concept. It’s not based on science, because it’s impossible to have a horoscope based on science. But it’s science heavy.
Pathologists believe they have found the Achilles Heel of HIV (Science Daily)
Quantum Poetics (Guardian). Writing about space is difficult. Since the time of Lucretius, poetry has taken science - investigations of nature - as part of its legitimate subject matter. Dante used medieval cosmography, Chaucer was well versed in astrology, alchemy, medicine and physiognomy. Milton and Donne had complicated reactions to the drastic realignments inherent in Copernican theory and Galilean astronomy. When Newton (partially) revealed the workings of the universe, Alexander Pope led the cheerleaders: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: / God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.” Now, post-Darwin, post-Einstein, post-Hawking, the questions multiply like cells and come from every direction: relativity theory, quantum mechanics, neuroscience, genetics, astrophysics … The “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of religion continues and science is, for many, the main entrance to the universe. Though you can refuse to go in, of course. Yeats did, and took to superstition.
Why Migraines Strike (Scientific American)
The End of Theory (Chris Anderson). Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The Worms Crawl In. (NYT) In 2004, David Pritchard applied a dressing to his arm that was crawling with pin-size hookworm larvae, like maggots on the surface of meat. He left the wrap on for several days to make sure that the squirming freeloaders would infiltrate his system. “The itch when they cross through your skin is indescribable,” he said. “My wife was a bit nervous about the whole thing.” Dr. Pritchard, an immunologist-biologist at the University of Nottingham, is no masochist. His self-infection was in the interest of science. While carrying out field work in Papua New Guinea in the late 1980s, he noticed that Papuans infected with the Necator americanus hookworm, a parasite that lives in the human gut, did not suffer much from an assortment of autoimmune-related illnesses, including hay fever and asthma. Over the years, Dr. Pritchard has developed a theory to explain the phenomenon. “The allergic response evolved to help expel parasites, and we think the worms have found a way of switching off the immune system in order to survive,” he said. “That’s why infected people have fewer allergic symptoms.” To test his theory, and to see whether he can translate it into therapeutic pay dirt, Dr. Pritchard is recruiting clinical trial participants willing to be infected with 10 hookworms each in hopes of banishing their allergies and asthma.
The Eyes Have It (Nature). Fossilized flatfish settle evolutionary conundrum.
Eye On The Universe (Harvard Magazine). This fall, astronauts aboard the space shuttle Atlantis will pay a final visit to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). They will install new instruments enabling it to peer deeper into space than ever before, and replace aging gyroscopes and batteries to keep it running until at least 2013. For nearly two decades, the orbiting telescope has radioed back to Earth images that have altered our understanding of the universe. The Hubble helped confirm the existence of dark matter: mass that we cannot see, but which nevertheless makes its gravitational in uence visible by bending light itself. It proved the existence of black holes, previously a theoretical concept, and enabled the study of star formation and destruction—supernovae—as never before. The Hubble captured the first evidence that planet formation is common during the birth of stars, and has detected life-forming gas on extrasolar planets. It has provided dramatically improved estimates of the age of the universe, and led scientists to the inescapable conclusion that an unknown force—dark energy—is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.
Meet Lonesome George. A Galapagos tortoise. He’s famous! He might even be a dad.
Greenland Meltwater Will Take Slow Wave Around Globe (NewScientist). “It is often assumed that sea levels will rise instantaneously, but that is unlikely, given what we know about ocean dynamics,” says Stammer. “The Greenland ice cap is much less of a threat to tropical islands in the Pacific than it is for the coasts of North America and Europe.” Stammer plugged data about the amounts of meltwater released from the Greenland ice sheet since 1948 into a computer model. This then calculated how that water spread around the oceans over 50 years. He shows that meltwater forms a “wave” of rising sea levels that gradually works its way south from Greenland, down the American coast, reaching the tip of southern Africa after about a decade. After that, it slowly spills east through the Indian Ocean. According to Stammer, the “additional” water only reaches the Pacific after about 30 years.
A Place for Science (Seed). Where I do Science. Labs at Night.
The ocean gives us life. It gives us oxygen, the rain, food, excitement, wonder, and mystery. The ocean buffers the weather and helps regulate global temperature, manages vast amounts of our pollutants, contains all kinds of amazing creatures, and supports all life on our planet. But—the ocean is just now beginning to be understood and with that understanding comes the increasing realization that the ocean is in deep trouble. Marine conservation efforts are outnumbered by the problems.
On a tangent, What’s Up Doc? (SmartSet). Pity the penguin. Darling of the animal world in the wake of March of the Penguins’ success in 2005, penguin fever quickly begat penguin fatigue. First, the film’s makers went and accepted their Oscar for best documentary carrying penguin stuffed animals. Then Hollywood inundated the market with penguin-centric films including Happy Feet, Surf’s Up, and Farce of the Penguins. The story of adorable birds with strong familial bonds on the desolate Antarctic landscape was universally appealing. But, as with most things adorable, enough finally became enough. This is probably why Werner Herzog opens his new documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, with a caveat: If the U.S. National Science Foundation — which sent Herzog to Antarctica — had been expecting a penguin film, it would be sorely disappointed.
Yellowstone Science chronicles the history of the management of grizzly bears - Part 1, Part 2.
Warp Speed Engine Designed (Discovery). Read more about it. Mathematics of the Alcubierre Drive.