Posts Tagged: science

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16
May 12

What Scientists Read

There’s been an interesting series of essays, and now projects, that focus on what scientists read and how it affects their work. While I know it has been an ongoing conversation in various venues for years, to my knowledge, the dialogue took on a new tone, and a new sense of urgency, with Neal Stephenson’s essay for the World Policy Institute in 2011, “Innovation Starvation”. The story was also published in Wired.

And now there appears to be an effort underway by New Scientist to study the phenomena of what scientists read.

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15
May 12

We will miss the annular solar eclipse coming up on May 20 — we are too far east and the sun will already have set — but NASA’s map tells you if you are in the right place at the right time.

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2
May 12

Get Ready for Transit of Venus

I can’t quite tell from the NASA illustration how well we will be able to view the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, but we are going to try. Because Venus’ transits occur in pairs, the last time this occurred was in 2004, the year our daughter was born, but it will not occur again until 2117. So this is it.

NASA's Chart of Venus' Transit
NASA's Chart of Venus' Transit

For more information, see NASA’s site.

And, of course, there’s an iPhone (and Android) app.

Here’s a site that offers local transit times.

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24
Apr 12

Scientists have produced a map of the brain. The lead researcher notes that they think they have found where particular mental activities occur: that is, their goal was to map, in a one-to-one fashion, links between an ability and a region of the brain. They used a large group of Vietnam veterans with localized brain injuries, who also suffered particular gaps in cognitive function:

Scientists report that they have mapped the physical architecture of intelligence in the brain. Theirs is one of the largest and most comprehensive analyses so far of the brain structures vital to general intelligence and to specific aspects of intellectual functioning, such as verbal comprehension and working memory. Their study, published in Brain: A Journal of Neurology, is unique in that it enlisted an extraordinary pool of volunteer participants: 182 Vietnam veterans with highly localized brain damage from penetrating head injuries.

I need to read the article. The summary from the University of Illinois press release defines mental function rather loosely, e.g. “general intelligence.” (This, however, may be in fact a rather precise term within neurology, and thus I am only revealing my ignorance.)

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17
Apr 12

Lego Antikythera Mechanism. Each set of gears perform once calculation and then pass on their “result” to the next set of gears. The result is that over 2000 years ago the Greeks had an astronomical clock for calculating the positions of celestial bodies at any given moment in time.

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28
Mar 12

→ Some physicists analyzed 10,000,000 words from 200 years and now understand linguistic evolution. According to my linguist colleagues, this happens every few years. The answer is always the same: when you reduce things enough, you can make all kinds of claims. The Language Log has more.

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15
Mar 12

Simple Harmonic, and Non-Harmonic, Waves

My dad sent me a link to the Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations that features a 15-pendulum setup, apparently based on a Russian design of some age, in which each pendulum is of a monotonically increasing length. The video, linked below, shows what happens when all the pendulums are set in motion at the same time: they change from swinging in sync, to swinging in a wave, in double waves, in apparent discord (or randomly), and then back again.

It’s the “and back again” that is so fascinating. One full expects to move from order to disorder, or even from disorder to order, but my brain was not fully prepared for events to transition from one state to the other and then back again, and then back again. What it seemed to suggest to me in the moment is that apparent randomness in some contexts is simply a transitional state between two different kinds of order. (This may be the intended function of the demonstration for all I know.)

The video is 1:46 long. Well worth your fascination.

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15
Mar 12

Watch the Jet Stream Tonight, Live!

NASA is launching five rockets tonight at midnight EDT off the Eastern sea board. Each of the rockets will release a chemical tracer that will allow scientists to “see” the jet stream on a clear night on the eve of a new moon — which will occur next week.

The live streams are listed on the NASA Announcement page.

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12
Mar 12

→ Erasing a bit shown to boost entropy

It releases energy and it creates entropy. (And then it’s just down hill from there…)

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29
Feb 12

Why the Universe Exists

When the Big Bang occurred, it created equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. Why didn’t the anti-matter simple consume all the matter? Because of a difference in the properties of matter and anti-matter known as the charge-parity (CP) violation.

Scientists are still working it out.

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29
Feb 12

Leap Days

We have them every 4 years, but not every 100 years, except when it’s every 400 years. The Bad Astronomer has the explanation. Here’s what it comes down to: our day is not really 24 hours long.

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8
Feb 12

Dancing Droplets in the Space Station

Astronaut and chemist Dr. Don Pettit performs a wonderful demonstration using charged water droplets being dropped near a charged knitting needle. The velocity of the droplets makes them first spiral around the needle before eventually landing on it, thanks to the charge.

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19
Jan 12

Lessig on how copyright is not only bad for culture but also for science

Lawrence Lessig’s presentations are worth viewing if only for their artistry, but he really delivers on substance.

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18
Aug 11

Moon Younger than Previously Thought

The news out of Denmark, where scientists there have gathered around a lunar rock brought back by Apollo 16, is that the moon is 200 million years younger than was previously thought. That moves the age of the moon up from 4.57 billion years to 4.36 billion years.

By the way, in case you were wondering, I have no idea how this impacts the theory that the moon is basically a big magma spitball shot out of the ocean of magma that was the Earth as the solar system was first forming — it got spit out when something else hit the Earth.

Apparently this puts the moon’s crust at relatively the same age as the Earth’s crust from around Australia.

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8
Apr 11

10,000 shipping containers are lost at was each year. The link (in the header) takes you to a report on efforts to examine the “afterlife” of just one such container. (Hint: Something of a Jurassic Park moment.)

UPDATE: Oops! I don’t quite have the post format functionality up and running. In the interim, here’s a link to the story.

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