Archive for the 'Science' Category

Advance Bad Universe reviews are in

Published on 9/1/2010 in Science . 2 Comments Tags: .

Astronomer Phil Plait hosts a new Discovery Channel science program, Bad Universe. Phil is a longtime, hard-working skeptic and proprietor of one of the godfather skeptic blogs Bad Astronomy. Which was selected by Time as one of the 25 Best Blogs 2009.

baduniverse_bikinigaugeTonight is the premiere of “Bad Universe”! If you’re looking for a reason to watch it, reviews are starting to come in from press folks who got advance copies. So far they’re pretty positive!

- Discovery Channel’s own Space News blog:

Bad Universe: Asteroid Apocalypse is definitely worth the watch, there’s great depth behind the science, plus a really nice Mythbusters-esque feel to the high energy experiments carried out to test Phil’s theories.

Ian O’Neill, who wrote that article, interviewed me for it as well. There are also a few clips from the show online on Discovery’s site, too.

- Watch Play Read:

The show does a great job of incorporating a learning factor without making it seem lecturing to the viewer. Honestly, you don’t have to be a SCIENCE! geek to watch this show, heck sit your kids (and/or unlearned significant other) down with you and enjoy. It was entertaining, informative, and the experiments were downright cool. Phil has an excitement in his voice that when he is explaining about a topic you can’t help but listen and absorb the knowledge.

(…)

Read more » and tell us what you think. We live in a TV-free zone, so can’t watch the new program ourselves.

David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation

Published on 8/29/2010 in Science . 0 Comments Tags: .

The 2009 TED Talk by Oxford physicist David Deutsch offers a new slant on the Enlightenment — what changed that caused the sudden improvement in progress? Theory that is “hard to vary”…

Go virtual young man

Published on 8/15/2010 in Science . Closed Tags: .

A fascinating little essay by mathematician Eric Weinstein in the Edge commentaries “How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?” Especially this bit on Grigori Perelman’s solution to the Poincare Conjecture:

(…) Consider the award in 2006 of the Fields medal (the highest prize in mathematics) for a solution of the Poincare Conjecture. This was remarkable in that the research being recognized was not submitted to any journal. In choosing to decline the medal, peer review, publication and employment, the previously obscure Grigori Perelman chose to entrust the legacy of his great triumph solely to an Internet archive intended as a temporary holding tank for papers awaiting publication in established journals. In so doing, he forced the recognition of a new reality by showing that it was possible to move an indisputable intellectual achievement out of the tradition of referee gated journals bound to the stacks of university libraries into a new and poorly charted virtual sphere of the intellect.

But while markets may drive exploration, the actual settlement of the frontier at times requires the commitment of individuals questing for personal freedom, and here the new world of the Internet shines. It is widely assumed that my generation failed to produce towering figures like Crick, Dirac, Grothendieck or Samuelson because something in the nature of science had changed. I do not to subscribe to that theory. Suffice it to say that issues of academic freedom have me longing to settle among the noble homesteaders now gathering on the efficient frontier of the market place of ideas. My intellectual suitcases have been packed for months now as I try to screw up the courage and proper ‘efficient frontier mentality’ to follow my own advice to the next generation: “Go virtual young man.”

Yes, Perelman really did turn down the $1 Million prize:

Four years ago, after posting his solution on the web, he failed to turn up to receive his prestigious Fields Medal from the International Mathematical Union in Madrid.

At the time he stated: “I’m not interested in money or fame. I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.

“I’m not a hero of mathematics. I’m not even that successful, that is why I don’t want to have everybody looking at me.”

Neighbour Vera Petrovna said: “I was once in his flat and I was astounded. He only has a table, a stool and a bed with a dirty mattress which was left by previous owners – alcoholics who sold the flat to him.

Weinstein is supporting the concept of “new media” for academics, like what the Public Library of Science is attempting: to end-run the stodgy old road block of the traditional journals. Like the problem with tenure committees, these journals and peer reviewers all tend to be the “old geezers” protecting their turf. Who are not motivated to seriously consider innovative new thinking.

The Blue Brain project

Published on 8/11/2010 in Science . Closed Tags: .
A computer simulation of the upper layer of a rat brain neocortical column. Here neurons light up in a “global excitatory state” of blues and yellows. Courtesy of Dr. Pablo de Heras Ciechomski/Visualbiotech

“I wanted to model the brain because we didn’t understand it”, he says. “The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch.” – Henry Markram

Markram is a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. His TED Talk reminded us of Ray Kurzweil’s Moore’s Law-based optimism that simulation modeling of the human brain would lead to breakout AI. How close is Markram’s team to a complete simulation of a human brain? Here’s Markram’s version in an well-researched article at Seed Magazine by Johah Lehrer.

(…)In fact, the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. “We have already shown that the model can scale up,” Markram says. “What is holding us back now are the computers.” The numbers speak for themselves. Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That’s about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion . But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he’ll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.

Newly discovered crater is one of Earth’s youngest impacts

Published on 7/24/2010 in Science . Closed Tags: .

Fun!

Researchers scouring Google Earth for impact craters have discovered a new one in Egypt, National Geographic reports. Dubbed the Kamil Crater, it is small but very special, because it really is new, in geological terms — just a few thousand years old. So new, in fact, that the elements have not yet been able to erode the ejecta rays. On site, the researchers have been able to collect thousands of space rocks.

These findings were published just yesterday in the journal Science. The full text article requires a subscription, but the supporting online material does not. This material includes satellite images of the crater that contain coordinate information. So without further ado, here’s the crater on Google Maps:


View Larger Map

It’s a real beauty, and it really is in the middle of nowhere. The imagery we see currently in Google Earth/Maps was collected on May 21, 2006.

[Update 0546 UTC: Some more crater links:
This page explains that the crater was first noticed in February 2009, and confirmed on-site in February 2010. Here's the official page for the crater, labeled Gebel Kamil, at the Meteorological Society. Some guy on Ebay is purporting to sell pieces of the ejecta found at the crater site. It sounds dubious (what's with the piaster notes?), but the page has a good aerial image of the crater:


(Click to enlarge)]

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Cancer Deaths to Double

Published on 6/7/2010 in Science . Closed Tags: .

The morning headline is designed to make you nervous: Cancer deaths to double by 2030: study.

“My God!,” you reason to yourself before the coffee hits the bloodstream, “That means the chances are double that I’ll be stricken down by the Big ‘C’!” If you’re typical—and most of you are not—you will add: “Why doesn’t the government do something!”

Fortunately, we have the Statistician to the Stars to unravel this typical example of “Bad Stats” in the media. Then for an uplift go on to read Briggs’ new term “Brights” descriptive of scientists such as Richard Dawkins.

Druid solutions to traffic accidents

Published on 5/29/2010 in Science . Closed Tags: .

Ilmar Tessman is to a civil engineer what a homeopath is to a physician.

Steve Packard also detected that the photo isn’t of the actual Druid, but the idiocy appears to be the real thing.

Michael Specter: The danger of science denial

Published on 5/27/2010 in Science . Closed Tags: .

Science writer Michael Specter delivered a not-to-be-missed TED Talk. Specter has done his homework for his new book Denialism and it shows throughout his talk as he ticks off example after example of the heavy costs of science denial.

Read the book, enjoy his TED Talk. Then do something about it — fight the anti-science ‘believers’ whenever they surface, whatever form of progress they are trying to destroy: whether it is vaccines, genetically engineered foods, or nuclear power.

(…) if we continue to act the way we’re acting, we’re guilty of something that I don’t think we want to be guilty of, high-tech colonialism. There’s no other way to describe what’s going on here. It’s selfish, it’s ugly, it’s beneath us, and we really have to stop it.

Nine Questions, Nine Answers.

Published on 5/24/2010 in Healthcare and Science . Closed Tags: .

Science-Based Medicine is a great resource. Mark Crislip provides a good example with his rebuttal for the anti-vaccine clowns:

(…) What brings on this particular bit of angst is a bit of whimsy on the Internet called “9 Questions That Stump Every Pro-Vaccine Advocate and Their Claims.” by David Mihalovic, ND. Mr. Mihalovic identifies himself as “a naturopathic medical doctor who specializes in vaccine research.” However, just where the research is published is uncertain as his name yields no publications on Pubmed. BTW. I specialize in beer research. Same credentials.

The nine questions show up frequently on the interwebs, similar to questions on what to ask when you want to stump an evolutionist. Similar to the supposed stumpers for evolution, the vaccine questions are grounded in misinformation, ignorance or laziness. Let’s go through them one at a time.

1. Could you please provide one double-blind, placebo-controlled study that can prove the safety and effectiveness of vaccines?

One trial? It took me 55 seconds to find ”Efficacy of 23-valent pneumococcal vaccine in preventing pneumonia and improving survival in nursing home residents: double blind, randomised and placebo controlled trial” and that included time to boot the browser and mis-spell the search terms. ’Vaccine’, ‘efficacy’, ’randomized’ and ’placebo control trial’ results in 416 Pubmed references; add ’safety’ to the search terms, you get 126 returns. 416 is easily more than one. Of course, to find them you have to look.

Of course, I am a highly educated adult who constantly searches the web for medical information. For hoots and giggles, I asked my 12 year old son, whose passions are basketball and filming comedy videos, to find me a reference that met the same criteria and I timed him.

Twenty two seconds, not including boot time, to find “Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial of Inactivated Poliovirus Vaccine in Cuba” from the NEJM. Can anyone beat my son?

12 yo one, Mihalovic 0. Served.

As long as we are on the topic, since he evidently place great store in science, could Mihalovic please provide one double-blind, placebo-controlled study that can prove the safety and effectiveness of naturopathy? I would be happy at this point to know just to know he was able to do a pubmed search correctly just to make me look the fool.

There are eight more smackdowns to enjoy.

Homeopathy – Failing Randomized Controlled Trials Since 1835

Published on 5/15/2010 in Healthcare and Science . Closed Tags: .

Steven Novella’s Science-Based Medicine has an excellent reference page on Homeopathy.

I’m sad to say that this is the last day of World Homeopathy Awareness Week. We’ve tried to give homeopathy its due honor, providing it the attention its practitioners clearly desire, while continuing to cover pertinent news in the world of homeopathy and providing a somewhat more sober, rational discussion of it on our homeopathy reference page.

Of course, most of this has not been news in the literal sense of the word. There hasn’t been anything truly new in homeopathy since its invention (no, not discovery; discovery implies that something actually exists to be found) by Hahnemann in 1796.

That’s just a teaser – do read the complete reference page. You’ll want to have the link handy for those times that you meet a new homeopathy believer (they are a lot more common than we would like).

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