Impatient Futurist: Your Personal, Automated Mass Transit Vehicle Is on Its Way | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2012-04-30 17:00:00
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Today’s physics news: Sunny outlook for space weather forecasters, move over graphene, silicene is the new star material and more
Updated: 2012-04-30 11:24:56Today’s physics news: Sunny outlook for space weather forecasters, move over graphene, silicene is the new star material and more Sunny outlook for space weather forecasters Companies seek to sell tailor-made predictions of geomagnetic storms to airlines and electricity suppliers. Nature Call for clarity on wind turbines The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) is [...]Star Breeding Grounds | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2012-04-29 01:50:00Vast clouds of star-forming gas and dust burst into view in this newly released image of the constellations Cassiopeia and Cepheus, taken by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite, or WISE. Space-based infrared telescopes like WISE allow astronomers to see past the hot, bright stars that dominate visible-light images and probe the subtle, cold regions of gas and dust where stars are born. The most frigid stuff, which can be –280 degrees Fahrenheit, appears red here; warmer objects look bluer...
The Big, Overlooked Factor in the Rise of Pandemics: The Human Vector | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2012-04-26 17:55:00, :
Want to Make Rational Decisions? Think About Them In a Foreign Language. | 80beats
Updated: 2012-04-26 17:48:46. Subscribe Today Renew Give a Gift Archives Customer Service Facebook Twitter Newsletter SEARCH Health Medicine Mind Brain Technology Space Human Origins Living World Environment Physics Math Video Photos Podcast RSS Ancient Microbes Bacteriasicles” From Melting Glaciers Are Spilling Into Oceans The Real Problem with Driverless Cars Want to Make Rational Decisions Think About Them In a Foreign . Language Behavioral economists have documented the all too many ways that humans are predictably irrational . Emotions and biases often just get the better of us . In a new study in Psychological Science however , psychologists found that people forced to think in a foreign language made more rational decisions . C’est vrai Psychologists took classic scenarios from behavioral economics and posedSaints + Sinners: Satellite Crashers, Alien-Hunter Funders | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2012-04-26 16:45:00: ,
How advances in computing will change our society
Updated: 2012-04-26 10:29:26
Manik Surtani is a senior software engineer at Red Hat Inc. Involved in the creation of open source technology, he is well placed to tell students at the Royal Institution about the social impacts of new technologies. The talk includes cloud computing, smart phones and social networks. The talk was part of a series from [...]help casey driessen get his kicks with fiddle sticks
Updated: 2012-04-25 22:36:18
What Particle Are You? | Cosmic Variance
Updated: 2012-04-25 16:45:50
A flowchart I put together for The Particle at the End of the Universe. Feel free to spread around, with appropriate attribution. Sorry for the tiny writing, there are a lot of particles! Click to embiggen and get a legible version.Today’s physics news: Mining asteroids could boost space exploration and Cryosat mission’s new views of polar ice
Updated: 2012-04-25 11:42:38Today’s physics news: Mining asteroids could boost space exploration and Cryosat mission’s new views of polar ice Mining asteroids could boost space exploration Talk of mining asteroids was once the preserve of corduroy-flare-clad, optimists of the Apollo era. Now the idea is making a comeback thanks to enterprising tech billionaires and a nascent commercial space [...]Something and Nothing
Updated: 2012-04-23 20:06:10In the something of interest category, last week at Columbia there was a panel discussion held as part of the World Leader’s Forum, introduced by our president Lee Bollinger, on the topic What If We Find the Higgs Particle and … Continue reading →Spy on the Inside: Underground Control Center for Texas' Power Grid | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2012-04-23 19:50:00:
Aiming at Different Audiences | Cosmic Variance
Updated: 2012-04-22 18:50:30When I wrote From Eternity to Here, I was faced with a perennial problem for pop-physics authors: how to write a book that will appeal to the aficionados (although not scientists themselves) who have already devoured everything Brian Greene and Lisa Randall have ever written, but also be understandable and interesting to folks who don’t [...]Does Rain Come From Life in the Clouds? | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2012-04-20 23:05:00The plane pitches violently as it plows through the milky innards of a cloud bank. A commercial pilot would fly high above these clouds over California’s Sierra Nevada Range, but this 63-foot Gulfstream-1 seems to invite the turbulence. Updrafts grab hold of the aircraft and shove it up even as the pilot noses it down. In the back of the plane, atmospheric chemist Kimberly Prather wears headphones to muffle the roar of the propellers. She steadies herself with a hand on an instrument rack and focuses on the bobbing screen of her laptop. Readings from the clouds spool across it. Those numbers tell Prather that these winter clouds are cold and heavy, –30 degrees Fahrenheit and just over 100 percent relative humidity. Yet despite being 62 degrees below the freezing point of water, the cloud droplets remain stubbornly liquid. As long as they don’t form ice crystals, these clouds won’t shed more than a few flakes of snow over the Sierras’ 13,000-foot peaks. They are typical clouds, teasers that won’t drop much of anything. After two hours of flying, though, something changes. The voice of another researcher crackles over Prather’s headset: “Ice!” The plane has entered a cloud layer where suddenly every droplet is frozen. Prather’s instrument—a tangle of metal tubes, wires, and airtight chambers nicknamed Shirley—tick-tick-ticks as its laser blasts apart hundreds of microscopic cloud particles, one by one, that are drawn in from the air outside. The size and composition of each particle flash across Prather’s monitor. The specks at the heart of those ice crystals are high in aluminum, iron, silicon, and titanium, the chemical signatures of dust not from California but from faraway deserts in Asia or even Africa. There’s something else in the crystals too: carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, telltale signs of biological cells... The full text of this article is available only to DISCOVER subscribers. Click through to the article to subscribe, log in, or buy a digital version of this issue. Image: A high-altitude balloon is readied for a 2011 launch at a NASA facility in New Mexico. It carried microbe collectors up to 120,000 feet.
Puzzles! | Cosmic Variance
Updated: 2012-04-20 17:30:56Science keeps advancing, in fits and starts. It was a good week for intriguing results from experiments. The first bit of news, which has been the subject of the most internet buzz, is a new paper by Chilean astronomers C. Moni Bidin, G. Carraro, R. A. Mendez, and R. Smith, which claims that there’s no [...]Spring in the Virgin Islands
Updated: 2012-04-19 23:31:43One thing that a career in math or physics research can get you, courtesy of financial industry wealth, is a nice trip to the Virgin Islands. A couple current possibilities are: The Simons Foundation funds week-long Simons Symposia, at Caneel … Continue reading →The Brain: Can a Brain Scan Tell You What Drugs to Take and Choices to Make? | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2012-04-18 19:50:00Ahmad Hariri stands in a dim room at the Duke University Medical Center, watching his experiment unfold. There are five computer monitors spread out before him. On one screen, a giant eye jerks its gaze from one corner to another. On a second, three female faces project terror, only to vanish as three more female faces, this time devoid of emotion, pop up instead. A giant window above the monitors looks into a darkened room illuminated only by the curve of light from the interior of a powerful functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. A Duke undergraduate—we’ll call him Ross—is lying in the tube of the scanner. He’s looking into his own monitor, where he can observe pictures as the apparatus tracks his eye movements and the blood oxygen levels in his brain. Ross has just come to the end of an hour-long brain scanning session. One of Hariri’s graduate students, Yuliya Nikolova, speaks into a microphone. “Okay, we’re done,” she says. Ross emerges from the machine, pulls his sweater over his head, and signs off on his paperwork. As he’s about to leave, he notices the image on the far-left computer screen: It looks like someone has sliced his head open and imprinted a grid of green lines on his brain. The researchers will follow those lines to figure out which parts of Ross’s brain became most active as he looked at the intense pictures of the women. He looks at the brain image, then looks at Hariri with a smile. “So, am I sane?” Hariri laughs noncommitally. “Well, that I can’t tell you.” True enough: On its own, Ross’s brain can’t tell Hariri much. But a thousand brains? That’s another matter...
Adventures in Peer Review
Updated: 2012-04-18 17:10:21Yesterday’s New York Times had an article by Carl Zimmer about increasing numbers of retracted papers in the biological sciences. Physics and Mathematics weren’t part of the story and I don’t know of any evidence of retractions increasing in these … Continue reading →Quantum Gravity at Scientific American
Updated: 2012-04-17 19:17:06Scientific American is doing a good job this month of putting out stories related to quantum gravity that actually make sense, steering clear of the multiverse and other pseudo-science. This month’s magazine has a very nice article by Steven Carlip … Continue reading →Plants Repel Bacteria's Assaults by Spying on Their Chatter | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2012-04-17 18:10:00Bacteria are quite the talkers. Lying low inside their hosts, they scheme up attacks through coded biochemical messages that are largely imperceptible to the immune systems of plants and animals. But in December researchers published the first evidence that some plants have broken the code, allowing them to listen in on chatter and thwart infection...
Testing the Holographic Principle
Updated: 2012-04-12 19:38:07Adrian Cho at Science magazine this week has an article about Craig Hogan’s project to build a “holometer” and somehow test the “holographic principle”. Since this promises some sort of experimental test of fashionable ideas about quantum gravity, it has … Continue reading →Emerging Grant Opportunity
Updated: 2012-04-12 14:33:37I just noticed that the Templeton Foundation has a competition for $5 million in grants in the area of “strong emergence”, submission deadline very soon (April 16). I’m not sure I understand their distinction between “weak emergence” and “strong emergence” … Continue reading →Theory Bubbles
Updated: 2012-04-11 20:29:38In this week’s Nature, Abraham Loeb, the chair of the Harvard astronomy department, has a column proposing the creation of a web-site that would act as a sort of “ratings agency”, implementing some mathematical model that would measure the health … Continue reading →SI-Globe-logo-April-2008_4.png
Updated: 2012-04-05 18:39:52Date: Apr 5, 2012 6:39 PMNumber of Comments on Photo:0View Photohot doc(s) alert: folk on film
Updated: 2012-04-04 15:54:40