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Domain: discovermagazine.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to discovermagazine.com.
Comments · 583
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Re:Rebellion
It's funny you say that, because Pollock's paintings have a very high fractal dimension, unlike similar drip paintings made by other artists (or kindergartners).
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Re:Monkey's uncle?Go look at the second link I posted, and search for the phrase "unequal in most cases". You will see a graph of the divergence of over two thousand genes between mice and humans. The data fits a bell curve very, very well. This is exactly what we'd expect if mutations were random. Lots of studies have been done in this vein, and no one has been able to find statistically-significant deviations from random, ever. (And not for lack of looking. Google "directed mutagenesis" to hip yourself to an example.)
It's true that the origin of life on Earth is still effectively a mystery. We don't know how the first cells originated. We have some interesting hypotheses, though, and they are being tested. Assuming that, just because we don't know something, we won't ever know - that hasn't worked out well, historically.
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mushroom picking better than beer?
The paper's pretty hilarious. He even cites a paper about the correlation between mushroom picking and scientific productivity. Another good (though less statistical) debunking post is here.
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Einstein's kids, grand kids, great grandkids ......the great-grandson of Albert Einstein working in collusion to pull this off," White said.
Actually, his kids, grand kids and great grand kids are all pretty average. One of his great grand kids owns a furniture store and 3 warehouses. See the current issue of Discover Magazine - has Einstein's photo on it.
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worse than picking mushrooms?
I read the article...if you look at the one figure, pretty much the whole effect is due to five people who drank a shitload and never published. Given that Dr. Grim drinks 12beers/day, and according to pubmed has only 2 english publications, I'd guess he is one of these outliers. He does reference an article which investigated the relationship between picking mushrooms and scientific productivity. Good analysis of this story at Discover's blog.
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Re:Self limiting to a certain extent?
A perfect storm for a disease is what happened when Cortes met the Aztecs. There appear to have been very few or no diseases in Precolumbian America, so once European diseases were introduced, they ripped through the native population with an estimated 90% lethality rate. For a perfect storm to occur again, you'd need a completely virgin population, which doesn't exist in the modern world.
No, the Aztecs weren't wiped out by European disease.
Usually, they say Cortes brought smallpox to the Aztecs, who had never been exposed to it before, and it wiped them out. This is incorrect on all counts, as related by this Discover article from a few years ago.
First, the Aztecs had been exposed to smallpox before the Europeans ever came. They knew about the disease and had a name for it. They weren't a virgin population.
Second, it wasn't even smallpox that took them out. The symptoms didn't match at all. It was a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola.
Third, it wasn't the Europeans that brought this disease. The Aztecs knew about the hemorrhagic fever, too, and had a name for it.
What actually happened, was that the Aztecs had the bad luck to be invaded by the Spanish and wiped out by a recurring native plague shortly thereafter. -
Re:no such thing as perfection
Here's an interesting related theory that definitely affects traffic:
http://discovermagazine.com/2005/apr/math-of-changing-lanes
Apparently you perceive cars passing you differently than those you pass, causing you to always think the "other lane" is faster. -
Re:Cr@p! Sorry everyone!developing a way to control the fly's behavior (where to fly, when to land,etc.)
SB -
Re:how, exactly
I don't know that modern corn can interbreed with wild corn.
I believe you can. In fact I remember someone doing it. Read past the petty where corn came from and you will find that someone has been cross pollinating corn for a while in order to track the origins of corn to it's ancestors.
At the point the finches cannot breed with each other, the finches become different species and are no longer finches. But don't confuse cannot with will not.I suspect that the offspring of a Chiwawa and a Grate Dane might not be viable.
Actually, the test isn't if it is viable. It is if it can be done. It seems that it can be done and the differences aren't a big as once thought Although, this probably isn't a good combination of offspring and barring any outside help, evolution in the traditional sense would come along and kill it off.I disagree that we have been trying to produce cows that cannot interbreed. For the most part we have been trying to create cows that make lots of milk, or cows that taste good (not to be confused with cows that have good taste, Charlie). Considering how few generations it takes to breed some pretty wild looking dogs out of a general "mongrel", I wonder if anyone has every tried breeding a new "dog" population that was incapable of interbreeding with the "regular" dog population? Selecting for weird sexual organ shape or something like that would seem to be a possible pathway.
We have been manipulating plants and animal genetics for well over 15 centuries if not more. The bible even talks about it with the book of genesis I believe where Joseph put a dominant black sheep in the heard so he would have all the lambs with black wool as agreed to by his father in law. Surely we would have recorded something that hasn't been able to reproduce back into the same species if it was possible. The Egyptians even breed greyhounds to hunt in the dessert.
I'm also sure that people have tried to make new breeds of dogs too. There would be a lot of money in it. But as it is, there us a few breed and everything seems to be subsets of those breeds. If a dog could be found that couldn't interbreed then you could control the entire bloodline and make money if it was useful for something.Selecting for weird sexual organ shape or something like that would seem to be a possible pathway
When we look at being able to breed, we don't look at their willingness or physical handicaps stopping it. We look at the genetic abilities for the eggs to get fertilized and start dividing to product a life. Otherwise, we could breed something sterile and call it a new species. We have done this with Bees to control populations of unwanted bees but they are still bees. I think a lot of the confusion goes with Species being used generically to describe breeds or subspecies. In the case of dogs, the genus is canis (or something like that) and then there is a species which differs. In order for speciation to occur, a species would in effect become a genus for another species.
There are people who attempt to consider speciation to have occurred if the species cannot naturally interbreed or chose not to. But this is what I consider a stretch of the definition of species. -
Re:Credit where credit is due...
Capacity for learning in insects is extremely small
Seems you can do some pretty amazing stuff with little learning capacity, see http://discovermagazine.com/1996/dec/abeeseessymmetry957. -
What about improving the way the internet works
http://mr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12356.html
From an article in discover magazine:
John Doyle is worried about the Internet. In the next few years, millions more people will gain access to it, and existing users will place ever higher demands on our digital infrastructure, driven by applications like online movie services and Internet telephony. Doyle predicts that this skyrocketing traffic could cause the Internet to slow to a disastrous crawl, an endless digital gridlock stifling our economies. But Doyle, a professor of control and dynamic systems, electrical engineering, and bioengineering at Caltech, also believes the Internet can be saved. He and his colleagues have created a theory that has revealed some simple yet powerful ways to accelerate the flow of information. Vastly accelerate the flow: Doyle and his colleagues can now blast the entire text of all the books in the library of Congress across the United States in 15 minutes.
I haven't actually read the whole article in a while but from what it seems, this guy has a pretty good solution to this whole problem that I don't see discussed a lot. -
Epigenetics
This is developing into a new field of study known as Epigenetics. Environmental factors, such as diet and exposure to toxins can activate or deactivate genetics.
Read more at:
Discover Magazine, November 2006
Wikepedia: Epigenetics.
Science Magazine -
Plone handles large-traffic websites
The comment earlier that Plone only can handle small sites is completely refuted by facts. There are some seriously big sites using Plone, such as Novell.com, CIA.gov, Akamai's website, etc. As an example, I know for a fact that http://www.discovermagazine.com/ (Discover Magazine's website) got nearly 100,000 site visitors just yesterday and gets over 1.5 million page views per month currently. Bottom line, Plone is really powerful stuff. If you are doing a small rinky-dink site, it might be overkill (depending on what you want to do), but if you are building a site that needs strong workflow, security, internationalization, standards compliance, scalability, good usability for non-technical staff, automatic related content indexing, integrated search, or any other feature used in a modern high-end website, you could do a heck of a lot worse than Plone.
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Beauty of God's Creation in Music
One thing that is a huge theme throughout the Bible is the worship of God through music. God created music. He likes it. He thinks it's beautiful. Like God (since we're made in His image) we like music too. Yet from a materialist perspective, I can find biological reasons for many senses we have. Women look good because of an innate imperative to procreate. Food tastes good because we need it to build our bodies and for energy. Smell's attraction can be good to motivate us toward mates and food. The sense of touch can be exhilarating for many obvious biological reasons too. But sound is unusual in the context of music. Why do rhythmically and harmonically organized vibrations of air sound good? What biological imperative is fulfilled by music? Then I got to thinking about this. String theory. The entire existence of everything in the universe is explained the best (so far) by a scientific theory known as string theory. Is music the hint that God gave us to how He did it all? Consider, only string theory so far can explain the 4 dimensions we can conceive (length, width, height and time) but also the electromagnetic force, gravity, the weak sub atomic force, the strong sub atomic force in addition to the 4 dimensions. It postulates that the difference in protons, neutrons, electrons and all other sub-atomic particles can be explained as being different vibrating little strings. This theory can explain other things like dimensions beyond our 4. It postulates other dimensions as many as 6 though 26! It can explain things like black holes, wormholes, parallel universes and other cosmic anomalies. In other words, everything can be explained by the way little strings vibrate. Is it a Grand Unifying Theory (in physics known as a GUT) of everything? You can break a longer string that is a neutron down to a shorter strings that are combinations of quarks. Quarks are particles even smaller than our basic hadrons (neutrons, protons and electrons). They're explained as the constituents of these larger particles. They're tinier strings in theory. The very fabric of the universe can be explained as an analogy of music? Is it all organized vibrations in harmonies and rhythms? Maybe. Worship music certainly must transcend the vibrations of air molecules in heaven. Sound here is limited to a wave propagating through air at 769 mph at sea level atmospheric pressure and at an ambient temperature of 70 degrees F. It has to be beyond that in eternity. That's a crude physical limitation. Then does music point to its originator? Is this the hint He gives us on how it's all held together? Is it the key that points to the beauty of God Himself? Is it that simple? I think so and it maybe. I see a pattern emerging. This is just one little gray wet bag of warm protoplasm trying to makes sense of it all. Now, how 'bout them Dodgers? http://discovermagazine.com/twominutesorless?bcpid=716091875&bclid=686943766&bctid=687029421 Rudeman
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Re:BIOSPERE 2 was not a colossal failure.
They had their chance, but none of them wanted it. Now, you have a chance.
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Re:Quit sensationalizing everything
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Re:Enhanced biofuelsIf you make biofuels the "traditional" way, you use microorganisms to break down molecules. These organisms use part of the energy stored in the fuel, and on top of that they are usually quite specific. What would be better would be to build a big nuclear reactor, and use its energy to heat up your (agricultural) waste to plasma temperatures. Inject coal, water or air to control your final product, and allow the plasma to condense, possibly in contact with the right catalysers. Voila: biofuel. And instead of having removed lots of joules from it, you will have injected some. At the same time, you got yourself an eco-friendly way to get rid of organic pollutants like insecticides. (You will have to find another way to treat heavy metals.) it's already being done Discovery Magazine There's a new plant being built here in Florida. You don't need the nuclear plant, though, the system generates electrical power as a part of the process, enough to self power (in the case of the Japanese plant), and with new technology already being used in the states, enough to generate excess power to be dumped onto the grip and, as a bonus, the heavy metals are processed into handleable units to be recycled. A real nice win-win technology... (except maybe the plant construction price tag.)
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Re:Yes
Engineers say a bee can't flap its wings and fly; and it cannot. A bee (and for that matter, flies) remain airborne because their wings trace an s-like path through the air, allowing them to move through the air in much the same way as a shark.
Think of it like a ceiling fan that goes back and forth. If it didn't have the ability to turn back on itself, it wouldn't do much to the air. However, if the blades bent in different directions for each direction, it would be able to produce a downdraft.
The best magazine in the universe. -
Re:Well, that would explainThis recent article talks about research that suggests cosmic rays significantly affect cloud cover, and thereby have a direct impact on global temperatures. It's fascinating stuff, and while it doesn't nullify anthropogenic climate change, it definitely makes the picture more complicated and more interesting. The interesting stuff starts on page 2 of the article. From the article:
"The basic idea is that solar activity can turn the cloudiness up and down, which has an effect on the warming or cooling of Earth's surface temperature. The key agents in this are cosmic rays, which are energetic particles coming from the interstellar media--they come from remnants of supernova explosions mainly. These energetic particles have to enter into what we call the heliosphere, which is the large volume of space that is dominated by our sun, through the solar wind, which is a plasma of electrons, atomic nuclei, and associated magnetic fields that are streaming nonstop from the sun. Cosmic-ray particles have to penetrate the sun's magnetic field. And if the sun and the solar wind are very active--as they are right now--they will not allow so many cosmic rays to reach Earth. Fewer cosmic rays mean fewer clouds will be formed, and so there will be a warmer Earth. If the sun and the solar wind are not so active, then more cosmic rays can come in. That means more clouds [reflecting away more sunlight] and a cooler Earth.
Now it's well known that solar activity can turn up and down the amount of cosmic rays that come to Earth. But the next question was a complete unknown: Why should cosmic rays affect clouds? Because at that time, when we began this work, there was no mechanism that could explain this. Meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation."
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Re:what awesome bodies we have
It gets even creepier when you realize how much of your body isn't human, but symbiotic bacteria and such.
For reference -
Re:Nope.They don't talk about Linux on CNN, they don't write about Linux in Cosmo or Maxim. Hell, how often do you see it mentioned in 'science' magazines, like Discover or Popular Science?
CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/05/18/global. office.linustorvalds/
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/biztech/12/10/me ta.linux.reut/index.html
Cosmo
Ok you Got me. Maxim
http://www.maximonline.com/search/index.aspx?sTerm =linux&stype=1
Note, We need hot linux chix, stat.
Discover
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/jan/emerging-tech nology/?searchterm=linux Popular Science
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how20/10160e0796b8401 0vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
And One of my favorite articles
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how20/b39fea1a2b09701 0vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
My Point is Linux is everywhere, You'd be hard pressed to find a neihborhood that doesn't have 60% of the homes in it containing at least one linux based device. Tivo, Router, Spa, Cellphone, PDA, NAS, and that number is constantly growing. True most consumers don't know they use linux every day, from the webservers they visit to the phone they use, and that is a good thing. I don't care if there ever comes a day when "the Year of the Linux Desktop" happens because that year came for me 5 yrs ago.
My daughter has never known a Windows desktop, and she is perfectly happy.
Me, I still cringe when I have to load up the VM XP I use for testing windows builds of my software. (/rocking in shower, Still not clean, Still not clean.)
Now if you will excuse me, I have to browse the web on my Nokia 770, connected wirelessly through my Lynksys Router to check the prices on a new Dell Ubuntu laptop.
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We can make petroleum already...
Two points -
We can already make petroleum in the lab, in fact these guys are already doing it:
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anything_into_oil
This book details how the peak oil theory is false, and that oil is abiogenic:
Black Gold Stranglehold: Myth of Scarcity and Politics of Oil by Corsi and Smith
(available at Amazon) -
Re:It's about recycling... not fuel scavenging
Discover has a series called "Anything Into Oil" which is about pressure-cooking landfill to release oil, gas, and minerals.
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil/ ?searchterm=anything%20into%20oil
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/jul/anything-into -oil/?searchterm=anything%20into%20oil
http://discovermagazine.com/2003/may/featoil/?sear chterm=anything%20into%20oil
Basically, instead of incinerating turkey parts, you cook them with water and pressure, to release calcium and a light oil (which I'm sure you've seen in your kitchen).
It's a simple idea, but in practice, the parameters need to be fine-tuned for each load of garbage that goes into the machinery. Still, cooking garbage into oil seems better than incineration (toxic) or landfill (big and smelly). -
Re:It's about recycling... not fuel scavenging
Discover has a series called "Anything Into Oil" which is about pressure-cooking landfill to release oil, gas, and minerals.
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil/ ?searchterm=anything%20into%20oil
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/jul/anything-into -oil/?searchterm=anything%20into%20oil
http://discovermagazine.com/2003/may/featoil/?sear chterm=anything%20into%20oil
Basically, instead of incinerating turkey parts, you cook them with water and pressure, to release calcium and a light oil (which I'm sure you've seen in your kitchen).
It's a simple idea, but in practice, the parameters need to be fine-tuned for each load of garbage that goes into the machinery. Still, cooking garbage into oil seems better than incineration (toxic) or landfill (big and smelly). -
Re:It's about recycling... not fuel scavenging
Discover has a series called "Anything Into Oil" which is about pressure-cooking landfill to release oil, gas, and minerals.
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil/ ?searchterm=anything%20into%20oil
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/jul/anything-into -oil/?searchterm=anything%20into%20oil
http://discovermagazine.com/2003/may/featoil/?sear chterm=anything%20into%20oil
Basically, instead of incinerating turkey parts, you cook them with water and pressure, to release calcium and a light oil (which I'm sure you've seen in your kitchen).
It's a simple idea, but in practice, the parameters need to be fine-tuned for each load of garbage that goes into the machinery. Still, cooking garbage into oil seems better than incineration (toxic) or landfill (big and smelly). -
Re:now the counter argument... ?
A quick Google reseach reveals the Inuit have only been where they are now for 5,000 years From the article:
"The Inuit people of the American Subarctic are an exception. They have moderately heavy skin pigmentation despite the far northern latitude at which they live. While this is a disadvantage for vitamin D production, they apparently made up for it by eating fish and sea mammal blubber that are high in D. In addition, the Inuit have been in the far north for only about 5,000 years. This may not have been enough time for significantly lower melanin production to have been selected for by nature."
According to this article you're totally wrong on the Ainu, and they are a great example showing that people lighten up as they move north:
"Another example is the Ainu of northern Japan, who have light skin but overall are very similar genetically to the darker-skinned groups that surround them. The evolution of skin color was apparently not a onetime event; it has occurred repeatedly during the history of our species. "
I can't find anything in the skin color of Mongols, but any reply has a picture which doesn't seem terribly dark skinned to me. -
Re:One more step toward a space elevator?
This isn't tomorrow's technology, it is something the human race might do a hundred years from now.
I think you're wrong about that, as do the people doing most of the research on the subject.
In this discover.com article covering Brad Edwards' NASA-sponsored research into Space Elevator technology, his completed work under a $500,000 NASA research grant reveals the technological and economic feasibility of space elevators. -
How it Works
The article doesn't say how it works. They link to a Discover Magazine article that describes one of their methods.
http://discovermagazine.com/2005/oct/climate/?sear chterm=heading%20toward%20twice%20the%20CO2
Liquid sodium hydroxide turns to sodium carbonate as it absorbs CO2. Then you percolate it over solid calcium hydroxide and the calcium captures the carbon. Then you heat the calcium carbonate to 900 deg Celsius to get it to release the CO2.
They claim to have developed a new sorbent that isn't as nasty as sodium hydroxide, but none of the articles seem to say what it is. -
Re:Well, it makes sense
Quantization may be showing up in more and more unexpected places, which may lead to the "floating-opint error" effects... here's some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity# Loop_quantization
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/oct/jarons-world- raft-future
http://discovermagazine.com/1993/apr/loopsofspace1 99/?searchterm=loop%20quantum%20gravity
http://itotd.com/articles/582/quantized-time/
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf103/sf103a05.ht m -
Re:Well, it makes sense
Quantization may be showing up in more and more unexpected places, which may lead to the "floating-opint error" effects... here's some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity# Loop_quantization
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/oct/jarons-world- raft-future
http://discovermagazine.com/1993/apr/loopsofspace1 99/?searchterm=loop%20quantum%20gravity
http://itotd.com/articles/582/quantized-time/
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf103/sf103a05.ht m -
Re:Implications are obvious
Don't think this will be limited to 'printing' cheap plastic prototypes for long.
The next evolution will be a generation of application specific 3D printers for other materials. Case in point is this machine that prints an entire house out of concrete.
The next evolution after that will be 3D printers with a variety of materials at their disposal that can print designs with different components made out of different materials.
I admit that it could be a very long time before we have a machine that could squeeze out a Ferrari, because of all the sophisticated requirements of the various internal parts. Some materials can't just be extruded out of a tube. They have to be alloyed, heated, annealed, zapped, thin-film deposited, welded, extracted from live bacteria, etc, etc, etc -
Re:Solution
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Re:Incomplete Story
It's a little more complicated than that. The actual exercise may not burn as many calories as you might expect, but it does tend to raise your metabolic rate and build muscle so you keep burning more calories even when you're not exercising.
For health though, studies are showing that subdermal fat is fairly benign. It's the fat that gets packed around organs that's the nasty stuff. People and animals with high trans-fat diets tend to have more of it (there are a pair of impressive comparison CTs in Discover from a few months ago: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/feb/visceral-fat) but it's also the first fat that's burned off by exercise.