Slashdot Mirror

Here's a New Scientist article talking about the same guy and the same technology. The only thing that's new is the fact that NASA is considering it for moon bases.

"News for Nerd. Stuff that's over a year old"

Hear, hear.

I've been quite surprised at the influx of "odd" observations over the past few years; I certainly wasn't expecting local pancake structures.

You raise a pretty good point, though, on the structure of disks, large and small, in the first place.

Plasma physicists jump up and down that the in-vogue theories treat large-scale magnetic fields and currents as non-existent, as though charge must cancel out on the large scale, therefore it has no effect. Sometimes, they make a good point - some of the disk systems do resemble dynamos.

Some of the papers I've read in passing on "push" gravity theories estimate that the force of gravity is proportional to 1/d**2 locally, but trends to 1/d on the outsides of the galaxy. Otherwise, there's a lot of unseen matter there (and we haven't seen anything resembling the high-velocity clouds gathering on the edges of the galaxy)... or, alternately, we're ignoring a dynamo effect.

Or... etc. (Assuming we stop before postulating that angels sit on the edge fanning galaxies with their wings ;)

It's the bank of poorly-explained pieces that will lead us to our next big theoretical breakthrough (or revolution) - but it takes some special vigilance to keep track of what hasn't actually been explained properly, and what's been merely papered over.

Too many tweaks. They should have realized something was wrong sometime between inflation theory, and dark-energy-requiring ever-increasing-acceleration theory. Plenty of duct tape on things already :)

By the way, speaking of aether... ;)

I can understand the establishment position somewhat... it's either duct tape or anarchy. There's got to be a standard to measure against, but if the explanations start stretching thin, they need an exit strategy.

If that day comes, they will need to exit to something, though. What's out there that can explain the pancakes at multiple scales of the universe and other phenomena as well?

Perhaps they need to take a page out of other research and development, and apportion some funds to "blue sky" research.

The biggest dividends will come from research that's reviewed for logic, self-consistency and explanation of phenomena without regard to how well it fits into prior patterns. Pro-Ams and people in fields with more easily measureable results (applied sciences, for one) realize these benefits, but being in a field where so many assumptions have to be made to interpret the results in the first place make this next to impossible for the theoreticians to condone dissent.

Everybody's MMV :)

-- Ritchie

Rye ergot, the fungus that creates the chemical precursor to LSD

The patent system is really, really, screwed!

Sorry for the unwarranted conclusion, but the second part of my claim may still be valid. That you have worked in a particular field (AI) doesn't automatically make you qualified to make claims about developments in this field more than a decade in the future.

Going back to your original post, the evidence that faster hardware means human and then more than human AI is as strong as it can be at this stage. We haven't found anything odd in the human brain that can't be simulated (and already simulated some parts). We found that individual neurons works in a rather simple way. We found that the brain is not a mysterious everything-connected-to-everything device, but a modular, rather crude and tolerant device. We also made significant process in brain scanning. All this leads to a conclusion that in a relatively near future (2-3 decades) it will be possible to simulate the human brain in silicon. Add a few more years and we might even simulate a brain that works.

This alone leads to more-than human AI as "an inevitable consequence of continued development of computer hardware". Your comment about "past 50 years" is rather idiotic, because 1) computers basically started 50 years ago and 2) we know for certain that today's computers are very slow compared with a human brain. As for the brilliant techniques, Moravec comments on that. There are, indeed, many techniques that are impractical below a certain speed (as a matter of fact, most of techniques are that way).

It appears to me that you simply have a negative outlook towards technology (not 100% negative, mind you), and so you attempt to fit reality into your narrow beliefs (see your last sentence about "utility gained"). For some irrational reason you don't want progress to work. Well, this is clearly a problem, but one we can't do anything about right now. May be your brain is low on dopamine or something.

In any case, there is basically nothing useful that simple negativism such as expressed by yourself can bring to the discussion. "This won't work" is simply useless, especially when others have reasons to believe that it will. I can't tell you to read up, because you claim you already read enough (didn't do you much good though), but may be you can try improving your outlook on life. Ask your doctor for some anti-depressants. I've also read today that Semen can act as one. Then you might be able to consider our future prospects without your preconceived pessimism.

The Bush Administration has majorly cut back NASA's budget, leaving them with little choice.

Hating Bush because he's Bush is cool and all, but he actually increased NASA's budget. They got a 5.6% increase for 2005 and are expecting (maybe already got?) a 4.7% increase for 2006. NASA is one of the few non-defense arms of the government which has gotten a funding boost, and there's actually worry that it might make it a target for other interests ("We should spend money on earth," blah blah).

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg185249 11.600

Check out #8. With probes and activities like this, we observe our universe. We EXPLORE our universe. We do what mankind should be best at.
There, we list 13 things that do not make sense. We should have 100,000! Instead, we're down here on earth fucking around with religion and arguing over whether Monkey Boy Bush should be president or not.

The once Dominant Super Power of Earth is a filthy, corrupt steaming mass of what it used to be.
One of the most widely viewed things in the world is the super bowl! The fucking super bowl! The most degenerate form of ape sports we could come up with!

We're going fucking blow ourselves up with Nukes before we've even opened our eyes because fucks like you are too afraid to get out of the fucking crib!

To those who call things like this useless, I say FUCK YOU, go back to your fucking super bowl and your Popes funeral and let us fucking explore.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2457

This reminds me of a Nature paper from last year:

Functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation by a robot scientist

The question of whether it is possible to automate the scientific process is of both great theoretical interest and increasing practical importance because, in many scientific areas, data are being generated much faster than they can be effectively analysed. We describe a physically implemented robotic system that applies techniques from artificial intelligence to carry out cycles of scientific experimentation. The system automatically originates hypotheses to explain observations, devises experiments to test these hypotheses, physically runs the experiments using a laboratory robot, interprets the results to falsify hypotheses inconsistent with the data, and then repeats the cycle. Here we apply the system to the determination of gene function using deletion mutants of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and auxotrophic growth experiments. We built and tested a detailed logical model (involving genes, proteins and metabolites) of the aromatic amino acid synthesis pathway. In biological experiments that automatically reconstruct parts of this model, we show that an intelligent experiment selection strategy is competitive with human performance and significantly outperforms, with a cost decrease of 3-fold and 100-fold (respectively), both cheapest and random-experiment selection.

New Scientist also had an article on it: "Robot scientist outperforms humans in lab."

i do not pretend to understand this as well as you seem to, but i do have one point to make.

while under normal conditions, the speed of light does appear to be constant, there have been nurmeous studies that have accerelated light to a speed above the standard speed of light. one article of many available is http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2796, which is enough to show that not every reference frame has the speed of light being the same.

Maybe this would add further weight to Hawking's proof of the black hole information paradox. If the anti gravity bounced 'stuff' back, perhaps Hawking's equations are simply predicting this? Or maybe I'm talking crap.

Yeah, and Newscientist doesn't post April Fools stories. Do they? Neanderthal extinction explanation

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7208&f eedId=online-news_rss20
look at the date.

nonsense, just because I call someone black doesn't mean I'm being raciest.

There's a distinct right-brain left-brain difference between men and Women, this makes it easier for Woman to process languages and Men to process visual abstractions like programming.

This show up as:
9 time more men are affected with Dyslexia than women.

Gay men read maps like women

Male-Female Brain Differences.

I tend to think he got it the same way as John McCloskey of the University of Ulster.

Reported on in the New Scientist a few weeks ago, and based on similarities with the plate tectonics of other major earthquakes, he warned that a quake of ~8.5 might hit Indonesia within a few months of Boxing Day.

Of course, your man might have been remote viewing. But, like most psychics, if that's so then he did it the hard way...

You've been quoted by New Scientist.

Here is the New Scientist article.

Hydroelectric dams produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, and in some cases produce more of these greenhouse gases than power plants running on fossil fuels. Carbon emissions vary from dam to dam, says Philip Fearnside from Brazil's National Institute for Research in the Amazon in Manaus. "But we do know that there are enough emissions to worry about."

Or maybe they'll have one of these roll-up screens.

From an earlier /.-linked article 13 things that do not make sense:

The horizon problem

OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.

You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen.

So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.

"A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'"

9 Dark energy

IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."

One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.

• AP
• PhysOrg.com
• washingtonpost.com
• NewScientist.com

Considering that birds are the distant descendants of dinosaurs, and considering that the article someone else referred to describes traces of proteins from 70M-year-old eggs as bearing "strong similarities to proteins from chicken eggs.", I'd bet good money that the answer is probably "yes".

The dino in the NewScientist article was a herbivore, and T. Rex was either a carnivore or carrion-eater; so maybe it'll taste more like eagle or vulture.

Personally, I've never eaten eagle or vulture. Anyone know wha-yeah, I figured as much. Chicken.

This is not the first identification of soft protein laden tissue that has been extracted from dinosaur tissue as Mary Schweitzer at North Carolina State University has extracted these tissues from other tissues as well, so there is a precedent.

Of course getting actual DNA from these tissues will be a long shot due to its fragile nature, but protein sequence may prove very informative in letting us define exactly where genetic lineages have gone over evolution.

New Scientist has coverage. No registration required.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7185

J. Wolfgang Goerlich

Psht, why does alien life have to have the same chirality as Earthly life? NASA or any other space agency could just redo the old Viking experiment. This was covered recently on Slashdot. A little more can be found here.

I couldn't get the link from the article to work. However, I found this link by searching on the site.

You are asking the right questions. It seems like the machine will definitely be able to make combs and plastic dishes - and maybe not much more until some major breakthroughs in other areas. First, the machines they are modeling their project around are made by the Stratasys company. The university website does not state which model they use as a basis for their estimates, but none of the existing models are metal capable. So at least for the present, anything but plastic parts must come from elsewhere. The size limit is about 12 inches, so any large structures would have to be composites. The materials are heat sensitive. No hair dryers or friction parts are possible. The raw plastic is also a special compound - the machine process is patented, I'm not sure about the plastic. One of the key assumptions in this plan is the use of conducting and semiconducting polymers to "print" electronic circuits. These assemblies tend to be weak and slow, limiting uses. It is impossible to guess what modifications would have to be made to his model machine to utilize this technology. I suspect he is low balling the price and the simplicity of the mechanical design. It's a nice dream, but has got a long way to go. It probably WOULD make pretty good action figures though.

billy - hanging on to his Costco card for now

Yes they are different because significant advances have been made in material science in exactly this area. Possibly the next pair of glasses you get will enjoy the same benefits.

Here is a pretty good article on the material with some more technical details, and also mentions how it has kept blu-ray from having to use caddies.

Wrong moon. You want Mimas.

Hydro; a clean, infinitely renewable resouce.

Sorry, but hydro is not "infinitely renewable" as it is really just an expression of solar energy. Riverbeds move, climate changes, and reservoirs fill with sediment. Second, we have already dammed something like 50% of all the available waterways for power to produce something like 7% of all the needed energy on the planet. What are we going to do to get to 100%? Additionally, damming rivers is devastating to the downstream environment. 200 years ago the Colorado River drained into the sea of Baja, now it just dries up somewhere in Arizona...

And finally, hydro power is not clean! Several studies have shown that the average hydro plant produces more environmental destruction and greenhouse gasses than a similar (in power production) coal plant. So your "clean" energy source is worse for the environment than a filth-belching coal plant. Congratulations.

Me, I'd rather have a nuke plant...

I prefer backup to DVD. You never know when your system will crash and your may have to restore from the install disks. And yes I did read the real article, not the agenda-ridden screed.

Let's hope the extra money makes the difference this year.

Hm... I went through three rounds of rejected submission attempts earlier trying to submit this story, several hours before this version was posted. In any case, here's my version of the submission, which has many more links:

NASA Watch, New Scientist, and Space Ref report that Dr. Michael D. Griffin has been nominated as the next administrator of NASA, to replace Sean O'Keefe. As NASA head, Griffin will be tasked with implementing the Vision for Space Exploration. Griffin is currently head of the Space Department at the Applied Physics Laboratory at JHU, is president-elect of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and has a doctorate in aerospace engineering. He's noted for being passionate about space exploration and having strong management experience. His nomination has been praised by a number of groups, including the Planetary Society, the National Space Society, and House Science Committee Democrats and Republicans. In the past, Mike Griffin has testified to Congress on the future of human spaceflight, the vision for space exploration, and the danger of asteroid impacts. He was also rebuked in the early 90s for pointing out problems with the space station's review process.

As for my own thoughts, I think Griffin is an excellent pick. I'm amazed that they were able to find somebody with as much technical expertise as him who also has such a large amount of experience with managing large organizations. According to the space.com article, Griffin can be expected to make maximum use of the emerging commercial spaceflight industry.

In the past he's also said the following, which I approve of highly: "What is needed is to retire the Shuttle Orbiter, and its expensive support infrastructure," Griffin wrote. "It simply does not serve the needs of exploration and it is too expensive, to logistically fragile, and insufficiently safe for continued use as a low Earth orbit transport vehicle."

In the past he's been highly in favor of the government constructing a new heavy-lift launch vehicle, which I somewhat disagree with. Such an endeavor could easily end up being a bottomless money pit. Hopefully SpaceX's low-cost launches in the coming months will help raise awareness of frequently-launched smaller vehicles.

Probably been mentioned already, but a work-around for one of the major limiting factors for the Hubble's lifetime has already been found, that being the number of working gyroscopes available.

After repair, the telescope has six gyroscopes (used for pointing and stabilising the device, without any messy reaction mass involved), and it needed at least three to point accurately. There are currently only four working ones left - they're somewhat unreliable.

However, a way of pointing the telescope with just two working gyroscopes has been tested recently, which should extend the lifespan a little - possibly until 2008. I still doubt that a full-scale repair mission will be launched, but this might help in filling the gap until a replacement is finalised...

Here is an interesting article about new technology for monitoring volcanic activity.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7042&f eedId=online-news_rss20

These Japanese scientists are using muons to look inside volcanoes. But traditional seismics are also used for volcanoe research.

Well I'll ask you to consider a few things first...
1. Calculate the energy density from all of these sources.
2. Compare to sunlight energy density at > 1KW/M^2
3. Factor in sunlight containing an ionizing radation componant.
4. Factor in pr0n health benifits. here and here

So yes it is safer to sit at home with the microwaves and pr0n that to go outside.

I don't have access to a land line, so I used to make long calls on my mobile. Often an hour or more. Once 3 hours.
I would end up with a headache, and this kind of feeling like my head was fuzzy, like I couldn't concentrate properly. It scared the hell out of me. Unfortunately its basically impossible for me to avoid using a mobile, short of abandoning my social life, but now I hold it away from my head, keep calls as short as possible, and send text messages instead of calling.

It has been pointed out to me that if someone could demonstrate a mechanism whereby low energy radio photons could cause biological effects (e.g. break DNA strands), they would probably win Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Still, ignoring what your own body is telling you, even if I can't explain why, does not seem very intelligent.

There have been some proposed mechanisms by which radio waves could have biological effects. Have a look at this New Scientist article:

Now Bo Sernelius, a physicist at Linkoping University in Sweden, has a new lead. He modelled the dielectric properties of cells. Water molecules have poles of positive and negative electric charge that are known to create attractive forces between cells, known as van der Waals forces.

These are normally extremely weak, typically around a billion-billionth of a newton. Using a highly simplified mathematical model of two red blood cells, Sernelius calculated what effect electromagnetic fields created by different frequencies of radiation would have on the forces.

He found that the water molecules inside the cells attempt to align their positive and negative poles with the alternating field produced by the radiation. They all end up pointing in the same direction, and this strengthens the van der Waals forces.

According to Sernelius's figures, in fields of 850 megahertz - around the frequency used by mobile phones - the attractive forces appear to leap to micronewton strength. That is a huge jump of around 11 orders of magnitude, and completely unexpected, says Sernelius.
If the effect could be confirmed experimentally it could form the basis of an explanation for tissue damage: stronger attractive forces between cells might make them clump together, for example, or cause blood vessels to contract.

Efforts to defend the US against bioterrorists - by throwing money at research - are backfiring, says a 750-strong group of top scientists.

What happens when the speed of light changes?.

Teach Software translating on scanning up

Not hard wares that sticks an comprehension of talks by scanning on thousands of fish translated papers has been vomited by US scientists.

Many existing translation not hard wares uses palm rules for botching words and phrases. But the new software, snarked by Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu at the Information Sciences[...]

Read More...

You can read the full story at New Scientist - there are some interesting disagreements between the astronomers about whether this really is the first dark galaxy

• http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050223_dark_ galaxy.html
• http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7056
• http://www.physorg.com/news3154.html

The wheel has already been patented. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn965

New Scientist magazine ran an article examining the rather more than 5 senses we all have. I think, at last count, there were about 20...

Senses special: Doors of perception

I have at least 21 senses!

You may be trolling but I'll bite.

...

An analogy might be a car with the brake hooked up to the accelerator. If you had to push on the accelerator 'just right' to stop the car (otherwise it speeds up!) then it is not your fault if you have an accident. It is the car company's fault for a faulty design.

You may be trying to make a point, but I'll bite :)

Its just a little unfortunate for your argument that such a combined brake/accelerator design exists and its a feature that would save lives if it were implemented.

No argument with the concept you are putting forward, but its a bad analogy.

Michael

Seriously, this has to be the most bizzare astronomy story tagline I've ever read. I figured this was the submitter's quote, or possibly the article writer - nope, it was from one of the physicists.

Then you didn't read the New Scientist article which had this gem:

But Christopher Thompson, an astrophysicist at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Physics, says that may not be so. The neutron star in question is rare magnetar, with a magnetic field so strong it could wipe a credit card clean from a distance of 160,000 kilometres. And this magnetar is even rarer yet, one of three "soft gamma repeaters" (SGRs) in the Milky Way.

Ya know, IANAPOAPOA (I Am Not A Physicist Or AstroPhysicist or Astronomer) but I'm willing to bet that if I were 160,000 kilometers from this object, or even our sun, I might be worried about other things than my credit cards getting wiped.

I though that the New scientist article on it was a bit more informative.

Apparently there's no Magnetars anywhere near Earth, and I'm wondering, since this star was 'the other side of the galactic center', could such things possibly be closer to the center than we thought? Would this explain what we currently think is the gravity of a central black hole?
Oh, and check out the New Scientist article.

The folks at http://www.climate2003.com and http://www.climateaudit.org/ debunk the crackpots at http://www.realclimate.org/.

The folks at http://www.realclimate.org/ debunk the crackpots at http://www.climate2003.com/ and http://www.climateaudit.org/.

This is as it should be in science.

The graph used in the New Scientist article about the Bush Whitehouse accepting humans as the cause of global warming, here http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6334, has been debunked as bad science here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/. Mann's own bad science puts any reports that use it in doubt. This is how science works.

How did they debunk it? They used the scientific method of attempting to duplicate Mann's study using Mann's data. They couldn't. They found flaws. They found buggy software - the math was simply wrong! It always produces a hockey stick even with random data with a flat trend! They reported those flaws. Unfortunately for Mann his science was junk.

Scientific understanding progresses as a result. Now we know more.

As for the Time Online report at the top of this thread (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1489955 ,00.html. Where's the data? Where's the software? Where's the actual report/paper?

Open source the science otherwise it's all disconnected conclusions and might as well be mind poo (a technical term ;--). Mann et al kept their data secret (as you can read at the links above that debunk him). That's not science. That's closed science of the elite or the schiesters.

Open source science is science that can be audited by anyone. Otherwise how can you really judge it's value? If a scientist with the stature of Mann can be debunked and have his result crushed like a bug how can anyone trust the reputation of any scientist? The answer is that you can't ofcourse otherwise you're bringing a belief into your resoning: a belief that you trust a particular scientist. That's not science, that's potentially religion, or at least faith based science (due to the trust factor).

Open science is the only way to go to be able to have supportable conclusions. The Times Online article is just a fluff peice with no hard data to back it up. It's just a summary of items to peak interest. Where's the beef? Where's the data? I want the software. Let's audit the software for bugs. That's what was partly wrong with Mann's analysis, a software bug.

Earth is too important to us to have the wrong conclusions, no matter which way they are headed. It's better to know reality accurately than believe in a fantasy as far as Global Warming is concerned.

Which would you rather be: faith based or science based? If your are science based then you must be prepared to have your views shaken now and then as a result of more accurate and up to date science. If you are faith based then go to church and leave us rational humans be.

Oh, as a final point, it's the responsibility of a scientist to be skeptical. To hold the neurtal gound even when faced with conclusive data. To keep asking the questions time and time again. To ask questions that underly the conclusions. To question the conclusions. Remember that consensus isn't science, it's mob rule, science works by multiple scientists auditing the data, methods and process of the analysis and conclusions.

Unfortunately for Mann his famous hockey stick hasn't passed this close scutinty process. Now he has to fight for his reputation and career. It seems harsh, but that's what happens with junk science.

I remain an open minded skeptic.

Pet

The previous issue (Feb 12) has some good summaries of global warming, particularly addressing a number of "tipping point" dangers - problems that will be much more difficult or impossible to fix once a threshold had been passed. See http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg185248 64.300 for a teaser. You'll have to get the magazine for the full article. However a brief summary runs as follows:

Ocean conveyor belt shuts down=much colder climate for Western Europe.

Greenland's ice cap melts=higher sea levels (7 meters) over a long period (1000-3000 years). However, the problem is that a tipping point could be reached with only a 2.7 degree C rise - this means the meltdown would begin but not necessarily reverse even if temperatures subsequently dropped.

Methane released from undersea sediments (methyl hydrates)->accelerated warming because this is a greenhouse gas. The estimate is that there is something like 5 trillion (10^12) tonnes of methane under the ocean in this form.

Oceans become more acid because of dissolved CO2. This could disrupt CO2 sequestration by interfering with sea organisms like corals and shellfish.

Rate of CO2 buildup may increase because, after a little warming, organic material will decay more rapidly. The short-term effect of more CO2 is faster plant growth, hence more absorption. However, this trend can reverse at some temperature as decay speeds up.