Tag: Science

  • Science night

    A bunch of science links tonight. Kind of a year-end thing. First, as reported by the BBC, Science Magazine has compiled their list of ten key scientific advances of 2004. The top three are the Mars rovers finding evidence of water on mars, the discover of the Indonesian “hobbits,” and the South Koreans announcing the cloning of human embryos.

    The next link, via Slashdot, is this New Scientist article about Mt. St. Helens:

    In late September 2004, a series of earthquakes signalled that the volcano was awakening. Since then, enough lava has oozed into the volcano’s crater to build a dome the size of an aircraft carrier. The new dome, standing 275 metres off the crater floor at its highest point, is now taller than a nearby dome built by a previous set of eruptions over the course of six years.

     

    “Something extraordinary is happening at Mount St Helens. We are scratching our heads about it,” says Dan Dzurisin of US Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO) in Vancouver, Washington, US. The new dome has grown so quickly – almost four cubic metres every second – that it has bulldozed a 180-metres-thick glacier out of its way. If this rapid growth rate continues, there is a growing risk of a dome collapse which could trigger a major eruption, researchers warned at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

    Finally, via Boing Boing, The Top Cryptozoology Stories of 2004. These include the “hobbits” again, Ogopogo in Canada, and (good grief) Chupacabras.

  • Flesh Jacket

    Okay, this article on a living tissue jacket is just disturbing and yet darkly funny. Basically, some guys are literally growing a jacket from living tissue…

    Grown using a combination of mouse and human cells, the jacket is currently quite tiny (about 2 inches high and 1.4 inches wide) and would just fit a mouse….

     

    “One of the most common and somewhat surprising comments we heard was that people were disturbed by our ethics of using living cells to grow living fabric,” said Zurr, “while the use of leather obtained from animals seems to be accepted without any concern for the well-being of the animals from which the skin has been removed.”

    Hey, I’ll concede they have somewhat noble reasons for doing this, but hello? We’re talking about wearing jackets made from living human flesh. Um… Hannibal Lecter? Skinsuits? This guy? Ringing any bells?

  • Blue Moon

    One for the weekend: tomorrow, July 31, (er, rather, today now I guess) is a blue moon. One definition of it, anyway. Enjoy!

  • Finding Invisible Men

    Totally wacky article on Kuro5hin: Using Quantum Cryptography to Find Invisible Men:

    But is it truly a myth, or do invisible men walk among us? And if an invisible man were to be created, how would we detect him and track his movements?

    Invisible man detection has gone a long way, from the clumsy mob actions of a hundred years ago to the sophisticated mob actions of today. The time has come to step into the 21st century with a quantum solution to a threat you’ll never see coming.

  • Great Salt Lake life forms

    Is this for real?

    Scientists Finding Strange Life Forms in Great Salt Lake

     

    With levels now at a 30-year low, the salt in portions of the shrinking lake has reached saturation levels ten times the salinity of seawater. Westminster, the University of Maryland and George Mason University are not only finding life where life shouldn’t exist, but life, perhaps like nothing of this earth.

     

    Instead of the rods, spheres and spiral shapes microbiologists are familiar with, they’re seeing organisms shaped like pyramids, triangles, squares and crescents.

     

    Dr. Bonnie Baxter, Westminster College Microbiologist: “Completely novel sequences that don’t match up with anything in the databases. And one of our genome guys who was taking a look at these said this looks like alien DNA. It doesn’t match anything we have on earth.”

  • Water on Mars

    Forgot to point to this the other day: Opportunity finds evidence of water in Mars’ past. Probably you’ve all heard this by now, but it’s still incredible.

    “Liquid water once flowed through these rocks. It changed their texture, and it changed their chemistry,” said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the science instruments on Opportunity and its twin, Spirit. “We’ve been able to read the tell-tale clues the water left behind, giving us confidence in that conclusion,” he said.

  • Big Bangs… and Bangs… and Bangs…

    There’s an interesting article in the February issue of Discover Magazine on the Big Bang theory—or rather, an alternative to the Big Bang theory. (No good link to the article itself, sorry; Discover only allows registered Discover subscribers to read the full article online.)

    The gist of the alternative theory is that rather than having space and time starting at zero with the Big Bang, there is instead an eternal cycle of universal creation as our three-dimensional universe is actually part of a much larger reality (having up to 10 dimensions). Every so often (“so often” being a trillion years or more), our universe collides with another universe in this multi-dimensional reality and the resulting explosive reaction is essentially a Big Bang that expands, cools, condenses into matter and stars and galaxies, and eventually expands into near emptiness… only to start over again.

    I like it as a theory, largely because it provides a simpler and more elegant explanation for the origin of the universe than the Big Bang theory has lately been providing. (Caveat: I’m not nearly as fluent in my physics and cosmology as I probably should be to discuss this.) I mean, dark energy—what is that? It’s like some kind of ugly, complicated kludge shoehorned into current thinking because no one understands why the universe’s expansion appears to be accelerating. From the article:

    Theorists invoked another unknown energy field, called dark energy, to account for that cosmic acceleration. “This wasn’t really predicted at all,” says Steinhardt. “We can fit it into the model, but we don’t know what this so-called dark energy is. The standard model is definitely becoming more encumbered with time. It may still be valid, but the fact that we have to keep adding things is a bad sign.”

    This alternate theory actually accounts for this expansion force as a by-product, without having to invoke dark energy. Elegance.

    Interestingly, I see this analogous to programming. Ever tackled a programming problem with a solution that seemed to start out simple, maybe even obvious? Then, as certain situations come up, you start applying fixes, conditions, adding complexity until basically the “solution” to the problem has become a kludge. (Or maybe you started out with a kludge. Either way.) Then, one day you have a moment of clarity—either you stepped back from the problem for a bit, or maybe a coworker suggested something way too obvious, and then Bang!—you suddenly have a simple, elegant solution that solves the problem entirely.

    Yeah. It’s kind of like that.

  • Lunar eclipse

    In case you live in a cave somewhere and don’t look up into the night sky, there was a total lunar eclipse tonight. Unfortunately, here on the west coast we missed most of the show; by the time the moon rose over the cloudy horizon, it was just past totality and starting to emerge from the Earth’s shadow.

    Still totally cool.

    Took some pictures with our digital camera, on the night mode setting. This is about the best one, I think:

    Lunar eclipse
    click to view larger image

    Pretty neat, eh?

  • What are all the colors of the rainbow?

    Our trip to Portland today was definitely one of the odder ones.

    In short: The good news is, Kaitlyn’s eyes are as good as they’re going to get, according to the doctor, which is pretty damn good. No more surgeries. The bad news is, the doctor recommended a second eye surgery for Brandon, before he turns 2 if possible. Definitely not what we want to hear.

    As for the (gory) details of the trip, this is a doozy: Brandon threw up on himself and he and the car smelled like puke the rest of the day. We had to buy him a new shirt at Goodwill because the one he was wearing stank so bad.

    Then Sherri managed to spill a bunch of orange juice all over her lap and seat while trying to fill the kids’ cups with juice. That wasn’t as bad as the vomit, though.

    After the eye doctor we went to the Lloyd Center Mall and had a highly mediocre cheesesteak lunch from a food court restaurant called Steak Escape (yes, they actually have a website).

    On the drive home, we saw the brightest rainbow I have ever seen when driving through Madras. I wish I could have taken a picture of it; it was truly spectacular and almost made it all worth it.

    Incidentally, the answer to the question in the title is: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (purple). Seven colors. Sherri didn’t believe me that there are 7 colors and that indigo was counted, until we got home and she looked it up online.