Updated: 2012-09-28 19:30:00
The son of a dressmaker and a professional gambler, Geoffrey West was born just after the outbreak of World War II and raised in relative poverty in postwar England. From those humble beginnings, he went on to a brilliant career in theoretical physics, eventually helping found the Elementary Particles and Field Theory group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1974. There he investigated some of the deepest mysteries in physics, including the underlying structure of protons and neutrons, the particles that make up the nuclei of atoms.
Then in the 1990s, at an age when many researchers begin downshifting their careers, West embarked on a brand-new quest, seeking the universal laws that govern biology. After joining the Santa Fe Institute, which focuses on the interdisciplinary study of complex systems, he went even further afield, using mathematical models to investigate the fundamental organization of cities, with surprising results. He and a group of collaborators discovered that simply knowing the population of any given urban area allowed them to accurately predict the nuanced details of its infrastructure and its socioeconomic state. Give West the raw census data from your city—regardless of its history or geography—and he can tell you everything from the number of gas stations in it to the number of patents produced by its inhabitants.
In his offices at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he served as president for four years, West recently sat down for an extended conversation with DISCOVER staff writer Veronique Greenwood. They discussed his history of tackling questions outside his field, the fundamental laws that govern cities, and his belief that population overload is draining global resources, steering us toward socioeconomic collapse...
Image: Steve Jurveston/Wikimedia Commons</a
Updated: 2012-09-28 10:47:00
Physics news for Friday 28 September 2012 Mars rover Curiosity finds first evidence of water Nasa‘s Mars rover, Curiosity, dispatched to learn if the most Earth-like planet in the solar system was suitable for microbial life, has found clear evidence its landing site was once awash in water, a key ingredient for life, scientists said. [...]
Updated: 2012-09-27 22:55:39
If you happen to have been following developments in quantum gravity/string theory this year, you know that quite a bit of excitement sprang up over the summer, centered around the idea of “firewalls.” The idea is that an observer falling into a black hole, contrary to everything you would read in a general relativity textbook, [...]
Updated: 2012-09-27 01:25:00
To mark their territory and warn off rivals, 21st-century gangsters still depend on the street language of graffiti. “Graffiti is a big part of how gangs tell their story and pick their turf,” says Steven Schafer, a detective in the criminal gang unit of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. A new software program called GARI (Gang Graffiti Automatic Recognition and Interpretation) is now helping Schafer and other investigators decipher the scrawlings, monitor gang activity, and fight crime.
GARI connects officers in the field with a searchable database of graffiti information and images snapped by cell phones and digital cameras. An officer can take a photo and submit it to an app, which tags it with location, date, and time. The software also scans the graffiti for distinguishing features, including color and shape. Officers can then enter queries into GARI to check for similar images logged within a certain area and derive local gang affiliation, territorial disputes, and even the identity of the members who left their mark.
Because GARI is so new, Schafer and his team must manually tag many of the submitted photos to build up the app’s information bank. The program is also still honing its ability to identify graffiti on a variety of materials, from wood to dirty cement. But even in these early stages, more than a dozen police agencies in Indiana have signed up with the program. “The real challenge is acquiring and processing images,” says Edward Delp, an electrical and computer engineer developing GARI with researchers at Purdue University. “It’s not like reading a sign on the street—every image is different.” The photos displayed here have been fed into GARI as part of ongoing police investigations in Indianapolis. The app itself is not available to the public—including members of gangs who could use it to avoid getting caught.
161 S Belmont Avenue
In early May, officer Steven Schafer snapped this picture of a vacant building conveniently located, for taggers’ purposes, in a dead-end alley near railroad tracks. Schafer keeps an eye on this spot since it reflects local gang activity at a school two blocks away. To keep tabs on new members looking to make a name for themselves, officers can manually annotate images in GARI to document taggers’ names. From there, linking real names to aliases and seeing where else the names show up can indicate where particular gang members operate or live.
The stylized SS stands for South Side, a faction of the 18th Street
gang based in southern Indianapolis. A rival gang sprayed red Xs over
the work as a sign of disrespect.
Government-sanctioned graffiti from the city’s Department of Public Works, in red, typically indicates
an abandoned building.
This board has been flipped or replaced, presumably by a rival gang,
and then signed by Lil’ Bam. Police are not sure who this tagger is but
are tracking his spray painting via GARI.
X8 ST (note the partial X on the leftmost panel) stands for 18th
Street, a transnational gang founded in L.A. They clash with the
Sureños, a California gang whose scrawls appear on the fence at right.
Lil. Puppet is probably the mark of the gangbanger who drew the X8.
Police know a Lil. Puppet not affiliated with X8. Either an X8 member
adopted the alias or Lil. Puppet switched gangs...
Image courtesy of Indianapolis Metro Police Department
Updated: 2012-09-26 23:28:28
Some short items of a wide variety of kinds: Witten has posted to the arXiv a long paper about the work on superstring perturbation theory that he has been doing. Superstring Perturbation Theory Revisited, together with two papers of background … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-09-26 01:26:00
Physics news for Wednesday 26 September 2012. Women of Wikipedia edit planned The Wikipedia profiles of women in technology and engineering will be updated at an “edit-a-thon” held at the Royal Society next month as part of Ada Lovelace day. Ada Lovelace day aims to raise the profile of women currently working in the fields [...]
Updated: 2012-09-25 19:10:00
Stopped at a red light on his drive home from work, Karl Deisseroth contemplates one of his patients, a woman with depression so entrenched that she had been unresponsive to drugs and electroshock therapy for years. The red turns to green and Deisseroth accelerates, navigating roads and intersections with one part of his mind while another part considers a very different set of pathways that also can be regulated by a system of lights. In his lab at Stanford University’s Clark Center, Deisseroth is developing a remarkable way to switch brain cells off and on by exposing them to targeted green, yellow, or blue flashes. With that ability, he is learning how to regulate the flow of information in the brain.
Deisseroth’s technique, known broadly as optogenetics, could bring new hope to his most desperate patients. In a series of provocative experiments, he has already cured the symptoms of psychiatric disease in mice. Optogenetics also shows promise for defeating drug addiction. When Deisseroth exposed a set of test mice to cocaine and then flipped a switch, pulsing bright yellow light into their brains, the expected rush of euphoria—the prelude to addiction—was instantly blocked. Almost miraculously, they were immune to the cocaine high; the mice left the drug den as uninterested as if they had never been exposed.
Today, those breakthroughs have been demonstrated in only a small number of test animals. But as Deisseroth pulls into his driveway he is optimistic about what tomorrow’s work could bring: Human applications, and the relief they could deliver, may not be far off...
Image: Shutterstock
Updated: 2012-09-25 11:50:28
Physics news for Tuesday 25 September 2012. Lib Dems adopt motion calling for increased science investment The Liberal Democrats have adopted a motion to build cross-party consensus around large increases to the science and research budget, and to press for a public loans system for postgraduates. The policy motion, adopted unanimously by delegates at the [...]
Updated: 2012-09-24 14:50:00
The Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, has proven a formidable weapon for the U.S. military, quietly lurking in the sky and then zipping in to loose a missile on enemy targets. Its effectiveness raises an important question: When will I have a robotic plane of my own buzzing about that I might summon down to teach a lesson to some of the many deeply annoying people who cross my path? A mild Taser zap or even just a spitball would be fine.
I’m very likely out of luck on this score, due to the bizarre fact that neither Taser zaps nor spitballs share the constitutional protection afforded bullets. So I’ll just have to find other ways to make use of the tiny airborne drone that will almost certainly be at my beck and call in the not-too-distant future...
Illustration by David Plunkert
Updated: 2012-09-23 16:15:00
A.D. 830: A storm sends an Indonesian trading ship drastically off course. Months later, dozens of ragged survivors make landfall on an island off the southeast coast of Africa, more than 3,000 miles from home. Today, Murray Cox, a computational biologist at New Zealand’s Massey University, says a scenario like this may describe the murky origins of the first permanent settlements on Madagascar, home to about 22 million people today.
Genetic and linguistic studies suggest the island’s native Malagasy people are mainly of Indonesian descent. The idea of early Indonesians traveling 3,000 miles to the island intrigued Cox. “It’s a surprisingly long distance to come,” he says. So he used computer modeling to parse the clues, running through 40 million settlement simulations. Cox soon pinpointed one that would explain the DNA patterns evident in Madagascar today. Surprisingly, the current population descends primarily from just 30 or so Indonesian women who arrived 12 centuries ago [pdf]...
Image: Shutterstock
Updated: 2012-09-21 11:18:03
Physics news for Friday 21 September 2012. Ig Nobel honours ponytail physics A UK/US team that came up with an equation to predict the shape of a ponytail has earned itself an Ig Nobel. Patrick Warren, Raymond Goldstein, Robin Ball and Joe Keller picked up their prestigious award at a sellout gala ceremony at Harvard [...]
Updated: 2012-09-19 19:45:00
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Updated: 2012-09-19 16:50:00
As incongruous as it may sound, a trip
to Nevada’s bone-dry Black Rock desert is what got Patri Friedman thinking about a
political utopia in the middle of the ocean. Back in 2000 Friedman had just returned from Burning Man, the weeklong festival of radical free expression, where tech geeks build elaborate installations and free spirits dance naked in the sun. Friedman, then a 20-something dot-com entrepreneur, was still buzzing from the sight of thousands of people casting off the shackles of societal convention on the desolate terrain outside Reno, and started wondering if there might be a way to unleash stifled political activity in the same way. His first idea was a modest offshore floating festival to explore the options, and from that seed a grander vision grew.
Today Friedman is a leading proponent of the seasteading movement, an effort to create permanent floating communities in international waters that would allow “the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas of government,” he says. Think of these as the political equivalent of business start-ups: self-created micronations where anyone could be president of his own domain, setting up his own political and economic rules. All it would take would be an ocean platform or large vessel, some capital investment, a vision, and a good dose of chutzpah. And settlers, of course. The laws of supply and demand would determine which of these micronations would attract settlers and survive. “If you join a city and you don’t like the way it’s going, you can float away and join a different city,” says Michael Keenan, former president of the Seasteading Institute.
“It’s not about one person’s vision of utopia, because most people’s visions won’t work in practice,” Friedman explains. “The concept is to open a new frontier so that a bunch of people can go out and try a bunch of ideas.”
Friedman and his collaborators have raised over $2 million to help transform idea into action...
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Image: A concept vessel from Blueseed would enable residents to live, work, eat, and play two dozen miles off the US coast. Courtesy Blueseed
Updated: 2012-09-18 21:34:23
Following up on last week’s European Strategy Group Meeting in Krakow, this week UK particle physicists are doing something similar, with a Particle Physics Advisory Panel community meeting in Birmingham. The talks on the experimental side tell much the same … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-09-18 16:45:00
On a bright February morning under a blank desert sky, three experts in world population get into a van in Tempe, Arizona, and drive back to the future. From the campus of Arizona State University on the edge of Phoenix, the three head northwest along Grand Avenue, following old U.S. Route 60 out of the city. On either side, what used to be cotton fields and cattle feedlots, and before that catclaw bushes and cactus scrub, has turned into suburban sprawl. The Phoenix metropolitan area, a.k.a. the Valley of the Sun, has grown more quickly than any other urban area in the United States, following an influx over the past decade of Hispanic migrants and white retirees. Due largely to the latter, the Northwest Valley of Phoenix is one of the fastest-aging population centers of the country.
The day starts cool, even cold. frost disrupts the tee times on the bright green golf courses dotting the Northwest Valley. Arizona’s median age is 34, but at the point where Grand Avenue crosses the dry bed of the New River, palm trees sprout from the sidewalks and the median age jumps to 75. Silver-haired drivers on souped-up golf carts nose into the traffic, one maneuvering fearlessly in front of the university van. Screened by a low white wall, rows of nearly identical single-level houses nestle on tidy, concentric streets. A big hospital overlooks the development like a lifeguard scanning a beach. Welcome to Sun City, Arizona, population 38,000, the once and future retirement mecca, where the whole world seems to be headed...
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Updated: 2012-09-14 17:15:00
Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger waves and smiles from inside her space suit as a bright yellow crane slowly lowers her into the world’s largest indoor pool. As the water closes over her head, a trio of divers swarm around her. They detach her 200-pound suit from its restraints and guide her down to a life-size replica of a portion of the International Space Station that hulks on the pool’s floor like a sunken galleon. The divers gently spin Metcalf-Lindenburger, 37, around and upside down as they fine-tune the flotation devices that render her neutrally buoyant—suspended underwater without rising or sinking, an approximation of zero gravity.
“Hearing me OK?” asks one of the technicians monitoring a video feed from the glass-walled control room overlooking the pool. “Yep, all set,” replies Metcalf-Lindenburger’s disembodied voice through the control room’s speakers. As she grabs a handrail on the faux space station’s exterior to begin her practice space walk, Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” starts playing on the shared audio connection. “Get-psyched music,” the tech tells me with a grin.
It’s just another day of astronaut school at Johnson Space Center, the 1,620-acre complex south of Houston that has served as NASA’s main training facility and launch center since the beginning of America’s space program...
Image: Shuttle mission specialist Rex Walheim simulates a space walk last year. Astronauts want the chance to do the real thing. Courtesy NASA Photo/Houston Chronicle, Smiley N. Pool
Updated: 2012-09-13 18:40:00
Beneath the arched, soaring, pale yellow ceiling of a room in the maze of Al Azhar University, past the wall of black-and-white portraits of imams dating to the 12th century, Heba Zakaria, age 32, sits across from a blackboard scrawled with the email address topmedia4u@gmail.com. (English is still the lingua franca of the Internet.) Zakaria is a member of the ascendant ruling party in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. She is one of the new generation of postrevolutionary, politically active, religious Egyptians using social media, cell phones, and other ostensibly liberating technologies—tools that just may end up tamping down intellectual freedom and women’s rights. When I asked to meet with members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s new media outreach team, their spokesman sent me to her.
With the world watching, Egyptians revolted against the repressive regime of Hosni Mubarak in January 2011. During 18 heady days in Tahrir Square, liberals and theocrats joined hands and the Egyptian people seemed unified. When the first postrevolution elections arrived, however, just one voice
dominated: The Muslim Brotherhood and other hard-Islamist parties gained control of 71 percent of the parliamentary seats in what international observers ruled a fair election. The Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi, subsequently took the presidency as well.
It remains unclear how much power the military will actually cede to Egypt’s new civilian authorities. But secular liberals—who didn’t even make it to the presidential runoff and who are a distinct minority in the Parliament—fear that the Islamist-dominated government will put God above human rights. Technology was not a leveling force in Egypt’s tattered political world. It gave an edge to the Islamists, because they had a political ground game going back decades and, some say, because they were financed to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by the conservative Persian Gulf states. Now these same parties have established a social media presence and are using the Internet to extend their reach...
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Image: Essam Sharaf/Wikipedia
Updated: 2012-09-11 16:42:55
Last year we brought the bad news that NASA had pulled back from the LISA project, an ambitious proposal to build a gravitational wave detector in space. The science reach of LISA would be amazing, teaching us a great deal about black holes, general relativity, and cosmology. Fortunately, the European Space Agency did not give [...]
Updated: 2012-09-10 15:54:42
CERN has a new version of the European Strategy Group (last convened in 2005/6), tasked with updating medium to long-term plans for future accelerators and particle physics in general. This week they’re running an Open Symposium (live webcast here), with … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-09-09 15:30:00
When materials scientists look at the periodic table
of elements, they don’t see a chart full of symbols and numbers; they see a vast molecular pantry that allows a near-infinite number of recipes. Successful raids on this pantry can benefit all of us. Take solar power. In the 113 years between the discovery of the physics behind photovoltaic solar cells and the year 2000, less than
2 gigawatts of solar power capacity was installed around the world. But recent improvements in the molecular structure of the silicon in photovoltaic panels helped bring online more than 10 gigawatts of new solar power in 2011 alone. Or consider the improvements in desalination plants, where in the past four decades the energy required to turn seawater into clean drinking water has fallen an estimated 90 percent, due largely to improvements in the filters used to remove salts. Cleaner energy and more efficient ways to use it: As the world’s population steadily demands more resources, the ingenuity of materials scientists will become increasingly vital.
To understand the innovations unfolding now—and the ones that may lie ahead—DISCOVER partnered with the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia to bring together six experts in materials science. Thomas Connelly is chief innovation officer at DuPont; he has managed the company’s Kevlar and Teflon businesses. Solid-state materials scientist Ryan Dirkx is vice president of R & D at Arkema, where he has worked on Plexiglas acrylic. Global intermediates technology manager at ExxonMobil, Mark Doriski has led production of the molecular building blocks used to create the versatile, chainlike molecules known as polymers. Chemist Greg Nelson is chief technology officer of Eastman Chemical. Chris Pappas is president of Styron, a company that develops plastics, latex, and synthetic rubber. And
A. N. Sreeram, vice president of R & D at Dow’s Advanced Materials Division, works on the application of new materials in the health-care and automotive industries. Ivan Amato, author of Stuff: The Materials the World Is Made Of, moderated their conversation.
How Is Materials Science
Changing the World Now?
A. N. SREERAM: The easy answer is to look at personal electronics. But materials science has made aggressive innovation in other, more fundamental areas that are critically important for us, like shelter. Forty-eight percent of the energy footprint of the U.S. is spent in keeping our living spaces heated during winters and cooled during summertime. We have to conserve that energy. If you insulate your houses well, you can save a lot. Products like polystyrene blue board insulation, along with other materials to seal your windowsills, can substantially reduce leakage of energy from your house...
Image: Clockwise from left: A.N. Sreeram, vice president of R&D, Dow Chemical; Greg Nelson, chief technology officer, Eastman Chemical; Mark Doriski, clobal intermediates technology manager, Exxon-Mobile; Ivan Amato, moderator; Thomas Connelly, chief innovation officer, DuPont; Ryan Dirkx, vice president of R&D, Arkema; Christopher Pappas, president and CEO, Styron
Updated: 2012-09-08 14:10:00
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Updated: 2012-09-06 20:45:00
The ice-blue, 50-story office tower looming over my low-slung Queens neighborhood seems to have a weather system all its own. On a still, sultry August afternoon, a pleasant breeze snakes through its courtyard, rustling the leaves of the birch trees planted there and lofting drops of water from the fountain across the street. At other times, the mood around my behemoth is not so benign. An ordinary summer rain can be transformed into something rageful; walking through the puddles afterward, you see trash cans stuffed to overflowing with disarticulated umbrellas. And when a real storm blows through, the building whips up vortices intense enough to smash birds lethally into the windows.
Every time I walk into these freakish, localized gales, springing up while a block away there was nary a breeze, it seems like more than physics is at work. The wind feels purposeful, mysterious, even personal. It kind of creeps me out.
In a sense there truly is a grand conspiracy going on. Every storm and every gentle eddy of air traces its energy back to the solar rays—173 petawatts of energy beating down on our planet, relentlessly heating the air and stirring the atmosphere. (A petawatt is a billion megawatts. We’re in literally astronomical territory here.) That’s what I’m up against. That’s what I want to understand...
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Updated: 2012-09-05 23:06:04
BBC Horizon this week is running an episode How Small is the Universe? with a description that features the usual sort of hype about modern physics: It is a journey where things don’t just become smaller but also a whole … Continue reading →
Updated: 2012-09-05 01:40:00
Your canine companion slumbers by your side, but is she dreaming of you? Does she feel guilty about stealing your steak off the kitchen counter and eating it for dinner? What is she trying to say with that annoying bark? Does she like watching tv? After decades of research, neuroscientists have begun to answer such questions, giving us access to the once-secret inner lives of our canine companions and even translating their barks and wags so mere humans can comprehend them. At the forefront of this effort is Stanley Coren, a behaviorist from the University of British Columbia, who draws on decades of research to explore the psychological motivations behind dogs’ everyday behaviors, as well as what science says about their barks, thoughts, and dreams.
Do Dogs experience the Same Emotions as People?
Dogs have the same brain structures that produce emotions in humans. They have the same hormones and undergo the same chemical changes that humans do during emotional states. Dogs even have the hormone oxytocin, which in humans is involved with love and affection. So it seems reasonable to suggest that dogs also have emotions similar to ours. However, it is important not to go overboard: The mind of a dog is roughly equivalent to that of a human who is 2 to 2½ years old. A child that age clearly has emotions, but not all possible emotions, since many emerge later
in the path to adulthood...
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Updated: 2012-09-04 17:10:00
Feuding between Democratic and Republican leaders has rendered the U.S. government nearly dysfunctional, with the summer 2011 deficit standoff only the most egregious recent example of gridlock run amok. As growing numbers of Americans say they are fed up with both parties, the door would seem open for an alternative. Historically, third parties have failed miserably: Ross Perot, the most successful independent presidential candidate in modern times, did not win a single state
in 1992. Technology is changing the electoral rules, though, inspiring reformers to envision a new and more open brand of politics, one built around online voting and Facebook-style campaigns.
For a brief, shining moment last spring, it seemed as if that revolutionary concept might take hold in the United States. Americans Elect, founded and initially bankrolled by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Ackerman, launched plans to create a virtual third party via a nomination process that would take place primarily online. By culling centrist candidates from both U.S. parties, it would defuse the extremism that makes governing the country so difficult. At least that was the theory. In reality, so few of Americans Elect’s delegates bothered to participate that by May the party gave up on playing a role in the 2012 election.
But that does not mean an online party can’t work...
Image: iStockphoto
