Lawrence Lessig’s presentations are worth viewing if only for their artistry, but he really delivers on substance.
All posts tagged science
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.
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.
Not time travel, but the ability to send messages into the future or past. Think I’m kidding? Read on:
One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.
According to Weiler and Ho’s theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.
“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”
From PhysOrg.com.
According to some recent research, cancer looks more like early multi-cellular life than a mutation of modern cellular structures:
According to Lineweaver, this suggests that cancer is an atavism, or an evolutionary throwback. “Unlike bacteria and viruses, cancer has not developed the capacity to evolve into new forms. In fact, cancer is better understood as the reversion of cells to the way they behaved a little over one billion years ago, when humans were nothing more than loose-knit colonies of only partially differentiated cells. “We think that the tumours that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago,” he said.
Interesting zeitgeist moment in which Nature and Science publish articles by established scientists critiquing the system that essentially rewards winning grant money above all else:
Mr. Mann, who served as chairman of biochemistry at Vermont from 1984 to 2005, said grant money made up about 22 percent of his salary as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota back in 1970. Now it’s 60 percent, as he pulls in about $3-million a year in federal support, and administrators at Vermont are asking him to push it even higher.
“Nobody has ever asked me how good my papers were, and I think you would find that universally true,” he said, “They basically say, Well, how many research dollars are you bringing in?”
From The Chronicle’s coverage.
PLoS Medicine has a fascinating article by John P. A. Ioannidis that argues that in an era where all research must establish, almost a priori, its “significance,” that we in fact have ended up with research that is insignificant. The problem, as I understand it from my reading, is that too many scientists — and the window onto the scholarly world is open here, I think — are required to be productive in ways that bureaucracies can “measure.” Thus, the race is on toward smaller studies that are easily commoditized into publications and away from larger studies which either require years to produce results or have too many collaborators for credit to be pieced out in ways that institutions like.
There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.
Here’s the official citation:
Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Just in time for Christmas, Scientific American reported on some recent research that speculates about why the movement of the North Pole has recently accelerated from its its usual speed of 15 kilometers per year to 55 kilometers per year: some scientists are speculating it could be a function of magnetic plumes emanating from the core — one imagines something like solar flares but instead of it happening in space it is occurring within the dense field of liquid rock.
For those who are curious, the north magnetic pole (NMP) was first located in 1831 on Canada’s Boothia Peninsular. It drifted for a while before bolting north-northwest for Siberia.
I thought it was a joke: the Republicans are proposing to cut the NSF. The link takes you to an actual house.gov page with one of our actual representatives actually proposing to cut the NSF. It’s no joke. Cue hysterical laughter.
Second item tagged with both pedagogy and science tonight, but there are some amazing things happening out there. I don’t think we have all the LEGO parts for the orrery described in this NASA page, but it’s great to know it’s possible, and my thanks to the Kepler Mission Education Team for coming up with this:
Lego Orrery
The full write-up, with links for PDFs to build one yourself, is here.
File this under amazing: an University of Illinois chemistry professor developed a way for student to use their cell phones for spectroscopy using nothing more than $3 in parts. Check it out.
Discovery News has the following story:
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has, quite literally, changed our view of the Universe. And after nine years of mapping the slight temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, its job is done and NASA has commanded the probe to fire itself into a “graveyard orbit” around the sun.
One of the things WMAP did was to give us a pretty accurate age of the universe: 13.75 billion years, plus or minus .11 billion years.
According to a recent article on PNAS, one year old toddlers understand the difference between disorder created by an animate object and that created by an inanimate object.
Here’s the abstract:
The world around us presents two fundamentally different forms of patterns: those that appear random and those that appear ordered. As adults we appreciate that these two types of patterns tend to arise from very different sorts of causal processes. Typically, we expect that, whereas agents can increase the orderliness of a system, inanimate objects can cause only increased disorder. Thus, one major division in the world of causal entities is between those that are capable of “reversing local entropy” and those that are not. In the present studies we find that sensitivity to the unique link between agents and order emerges quite early in development. Results from three experiments suggest that by 12 mo of age infants associate agents with the creation of order and inanimate objects with the creation of disorder. Such expectations appear to be robust into children’s preschool years and are hypothesized to result from a more general understanding that agents causally intervene on the world in fundamentally different ways from inanimate objects.
Here’s the DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914056107.
(For those humanists who don’t know what a DOI is: we need them.)
On the one hand, studies like this fascinate me for the territories they explore, as well as the territories they reveal for exploration by methods not previously imagined, and frustrate me because they seem to assume universality of results even when their data set is so limited.
Briefly: “Evolutionary psychologist Nick Neave of Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne wondered whether there was something about male human dancing that impressed females as well. … So he and colleagues cut out the effect of physical appearance by using motion-capture technology, like the techniques moviemakers use to make digital characters. … A computer used data on the location of the markers to construct an avatar of each man. … [and] Heterosexual women watched the videos and rated them according to whether the man was a good dancer or a bad dancer.”
Click the link above to see the videos.
Chris Lee has a terrific post covering recent developments in holographic theories of the universe. In particular, a recent paper by Erik Verlinde offers up a way to reconcile quantum theory and gravity: gravity is a byproduct of informational density. Lee’s explanation is much better than mine.
