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Taking mosquitoes entirely out of the ecosystem by making them sterile? Very dangerous to the ecosystem.

On a recent Science Friday episode they discussed another solution which is actually viable, which is to make mosquitoes shy away from human blood. Humans don't get infected, mosquitoes can continue living, the ecosystem can continue functioning as is, everybody wins.

Let us call it a "snark". After all, scientists tend to come up with whimsical names when they run out of rational alternatives. For example: after coining "proton", "neutron" and "electron", physicists moved on to "quark" as an obscure reference to a James Joyce novel, followed by the "up", "down", "strange", "charm", "bottom" and "top" monikers, which are even more nonsense.

"Snark" has a similar whimsical literary pedigree. It was the titular character in a Lewis Carroll poem - a creature that was hunted, but was itself indescribable. "Snark" was also the name of a character in a sci-fi novel: an extra-terrestrial intelligence, like the Clarke's Monolith, watching for developing intelligence in our solar system. More to the point, the snark in that novel spent some time orbiting our own Moon

The Science Friday had a related story two years ago. I recommend you all interested listen it (bit above 17min) or read the transcript from that same page.

Herpes is one of the viruses that seem to have something to do with beta-amyloid (plack) formation in brain. There is also some hints to that it may be related to changes happening in pancreas and 2:n type diabetes formation. I'm not in the field but following these studies been one of most interesting medical stuff I've heard of past 10 years.

This egomaniac isn't responsible, password rules meeting or exceeding his claim go back at least two decades for Commercial companies, and longer for "Government" (especially DOD). I have a policy from 1995 that I wrote for the company I worked for at the time.

Password enforcement was a constant problem 20-30 years ago, but we all had policies.

The short duration of a password was not some arbitrary number based on "mah ego", it was based on a majority of systems which could not handle a password longer than 8 characters.

I didn't invent the password policy, but by this claim I sure as hell could.

Oh, and password policies are as important today as they were back then. Go ahead and claim your fingerprints are fool proof!

turn Manhattan into a new Venice

On the plus side, at least significant portions of Manhattan are build on solid bedrock. Venice, not so much: most of those buildings have a foundation of timber piles...driven into clay...in a lagoon.

On that subject, writer Kim Stanley Robinson has a new book about a Venice-like NYC. Here is an overview and interview with the author.

In this Science Friday interview, DJ Patil says that the climate data is available for anyone to download and that the results are so overwhelmingly clear that anyone can analyse the data and see the human impact. I never thought this type of analysis was so accessible. I am wondering if anyone here on slashdot has tried to look at the data themselves.

Problem is, when you give a denier all the data, he'll pick out the cherries that prove his point and throw away the rest. Always.

Case in point: http://www.thegwpf.com/arctic-sea-ice-grows-back-to-2006-levels/ - "Sea ice charts for 18 January from NSIDC Masie show exactly as much sea ice in 2017 as there was back in 2006 – 13.4 million km^2."

So out of all the sea ice data sets they present this single point. When the documentation for that set specifically mentions

While operational analyses are usually the most accurate and timely representation of sea ice, they have errors and biases that change over time. If one is interested in long-term trends in sea ice or how it responds to changing climate forcing, generally, it is best not to use an operational product, but rather one that is consistently produced and retroactively quality controlled. The NSIDC Sea Ice Index monthly ice extent, and the satellite passive microwave data sets upon which it is based, is one example. The Sea Ice Index gives a daily image of extent as well as monthly products. However, these daily images are not meant to be used for climate studies or for inferring anything longer than seasonal trends.

In this Science Friday interview, DJ Patil says that the climate data is available for anyone to download and that the results are so overwhelmingly clear that anyone can analyse the data and see the human impact. I never thought this type of analysis was so accessible. I am wondering if anyone here on slashdot has tried to look at the data themselves.

My guess is cost. Sending data via satellite is very expensive, and there's a lot of data recorded. As for ground stations, I'm not aware of any plane-to-ground data communications currently in use (other than radio for voice) so that would need a completely new infrastructure built.

Nope. Sorry to interrupt your speculation, but the reality is that there is technology available for that. It's been used in corporate private aviation etc. many decades already. It costs some money, it will cost something to install and operate, but it's not too expensive any more. The reasons why it isn't been used in commercial airliners is mainly it's just not been a requirement to install, there have not been accidents which would had it made a requirement and because airline operators are business trying to make money they avoid any extra costs they can.

There is a very good summary of the state of this in Science Friday May 30, 2014 story following previous Malesian Airlines plane case.

ac

This was mentioned briefly on Science Friday last week. Also that some Staples are going to have them for "service bureau" printing.

It's a neat idea and a potential reniassance for service bureaus - I haven't needed to go to one since 44-meg Syquest carts were in vogue.

Eventually we'll all have high-strength 3D printers at home, but that's got to be at least a decade off.

Science Friday did an excellent interview back in 2008 with a Paul Offet and a concerned parent type.

She went down the list of objections, he kept giving reasonable replies.

She asked at one point "how many studies by the pharmaceutical industry or CDC have been done on vaccine loading". The reply "high hundreds to low thousands".

Her response "I don't believe that."

Basically NOTHING you can say will convince these people. In the end they simply do not want to believe and will continue to put forth their own arguments.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/s...

The whole interview is fascinating, but above exchange is towards the end starting about 15:00.

http://blogs.discovermagazine....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05...

http://www.sciencefriday.com/s...

Chang’e is coming.

BTW, SciFri Ira Flatow interviewed David Shukman, BBC Science Editor, about a week ago nice coverage what Chinese are up to with their project, it was possibly best lay summary what I've heard up to this date.

ac

Every few years we have people trying to legislate science out of the class room because it conflicts with their vision of religion. Of course our science classes are messed up, people have a vested interest in them being so. Frankly, much of what is taught is not even science. Anyone who comes out of high school thinking that science is about facts has been done a disservice.

And on the science vs religion front. Religion has rewritten itself often to adjust to realities that science has postulated. Science has never changed based on belief. So as a betting man, my money is on science. But as a scientist, I accept the possibility that I could be wrong.

I'm sure what you're describing does happen but I think cultural misconceptions about science are deeper than that. In particular, I think there's a very deep misconception that science is a bunch of immutable facts arrived at by a rigid process. In fact, I think that misconception is what drives most of the perceived conflict between science and religion.

Depending on what you mean by "belief," it may be accurate to say "Science has never changed based on belief." However, you can't claim science hasn't changed. Rather, scientific understanding of many things is constantly changing. A recent segment on Science Friday challenges several common misconceptions about the nature of science better than I ever could.

You could ask your eardrums how well moving things with sound works in a less dense fluid...

Not what I meant, pretty sure you know that... however, if not, allow me to clarify: move big objects. Like steel girders or something else practical.

I suspect that the mathematical trickery required to get sound waves to push an object in a concerted way, rather than just bouncing around chaotically, was a fair trick; but (normally trivial) moving things is what makes sound sound like sound.

Remember that all sound is really just a wavelength, and thus manipulation is a matter of adjusting frequency and amplitude... There probably is some arithmetical alchemy in pulsing the waves just the right way to achieve the desired result, but surely it's not all that complex.

I recall an experiment in which researchers were able to create patterns in a sandy medium spread on a metal plate, suspended above a large speaker; by merely changing the frequency and amplitude of the speaker output, they could create differing patterns and shapes.

Pulitzer prize winner Laurie Garrett, author of e-book ‘I Heard The Sirens Scream’.

Listen to the audio interview with her
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201108261

Her audio-book at Amazon ($5.99):
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B005DFHYQK/sciencefriday/

I can't say that they found the hand AFTER the hijacking. Perhaps it was swabbed from some surface prior to the incident? I don't know.

The Science Friday story (audio on the left side of the page) is definitely worth listening to. Quick version: sediba has some features, in the hands and elsewhere, that are associated with the genus Homo and our direct ancestors. But it also has very ape-like qualities that make it less likely to be a direct ancestor.

Ah! I see! It's a nigger!

That was what the scientists behind the discovery argued on Science Friday. Even Berger, who found it (and was implied to be saying it was a human ancestor) argued that it was more significant in opening up our idea of what morphology defines the genus Homo than in being a possible ancestor.

The Science Friday story (audio on the left side of the page) is definitely worth listening to. Quick version: sediba has some features, in the hands and elsewhere, that are associated with the genus Homo and our direct ancestors. But it also has very ape-like qualities that make it less likely to be a direct ancestor. It's also notable in that it was discovered as two very complete skeletons rather than fragments, as many transitional species are.

Cool story all around.

This was a segment today on NPR: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201108121

I remember reading that it was denied when some asked. I could find this link but that`s it..

http://www.sciencefriday.com/blog/2010/09/airport-screeners-denied-radiation-badges/

Too late for live listening, the audio will probably be up in the next day or so here:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201006252

If the twins have not been living near-identical lives (sharing cars, apartments, etc), they probably have distinct bacterial colonies, and bacterial forensics (an emerging science) could be the key.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201003193

This method cannot conclusively place an individual at the scene of the crime, but if combined with DNA evidence, I think you'd have a pretty air-tight case.

The psychology of pricing is pretty weird.

Science Friday interviewed someone that wrote a book on pricing "Priceless":

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201001015

For most people, the psychology of pricing probably isn't conscious.

I'm not sure what the prices should be, but I don't think the low-ball pricing advocated by some in this thread is necessarily going to yield sales volumes that offset the lost per-unit profit, I'm not sure it's necessarily sustainable.

There are recent studies showing it may be possible that some of our methane on Earth is being created by the high pressure/temp conditions in the earth's mantle, rather than exclusively by the decay of organic matter. A written article on this, or an NPR segment (about 1/3 of the way into the audio file).

NPR's Science Friday had an interview with the one of the scientists this morning. You can listen to the segment here: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200910161

This is a no-brainer!

1. Check out Neil deGrasse Tyson, who hosts the excellent show Nova ScienceNOW, currently in it's third season. It runs just after NOVA for several weeks in a row.

2. Try Robert Krulwich, who co-hosts the great NPR show & podcast RadioLab, with the equally wonderful Jad Abumrad. They are great for driving and listening.

Both are brilliant at making complicated sciencey topics seem fun and interesting. My 13 year old daughter enjoys both shows immensely with me. RadioLab, especially, is fun and funny, and you can gather up all podcasts on iTunes (there are about 25 full shows presently, plus lots of smaller in-between podcasts).

Both of these guys appear frequently on public radio shows too, like Ira Flatow's Science Friday, which is also good but a little more current eventsy.

Hope you enjoy these!

I wonder if that track really is in the public domain, there's a good chance that the recording on iTunes and Amazon has been digitally remastered. I know I was listening to Science Friday some time ago and they had a guy on who was a world class scientist in signal analysis and some label had approached him to come up with a way to recover the only know live (wire) recordings of Woody Guthrie. While that performance would not be out of copyright is the US anyways (damn Disney) the technical and creative masterpiece of recovering and remastering it probably deserves some coverage as a creative work in and of itself. You can read a bit about it here or listen to the interview here.

Cato daily podcast

Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog

TED Talks

NPR: Science Friday Podcast

Sorry for posting as AC, I've been a lurker on these boards for too long.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/newsbriefs/read/113

Anyways, a professor in my physics departement, Ermanno Borra, has been working on a very similar concept for about 20 years. And honestly, it has become pretty much a running joke, seeing how much money he's getting from the government, although he has very few results to show.

He works on liquid mirrors. It uses a liquid that is preferably ferromagnetic and covered with a thin film of silver nanoparticles, so that you can put an array of electromagnets under the spinning mirror to do real-time spatially-continuous adaptive optics. Sounds cool (which it is), but there are a lot of difficulties that come to mind which are presumably common to the project described in TFA.

Firstly, the parabolic shape is always pointing up. Since the mirror is liquid, as soon as you tilt it to the side, it loses its parabolic shape, and becomes useless. Now, the adaptive optics part may help you to try to correct for the distortion, but the best results that Borra managed to get is a correction of a tilting of about a tenth of a minute. Disregard this if the material they use for spinning actually solidifies after a while - you could tilt it afterwards, I guess. Not the liquid one, though Borra has promised a range of 5 to 10 degrees on his device for years.

Even if it becomes hard as concrete, the logistics of tilting a 50-meter wide piece of concrete without any structural deformation is impressive. That means, unless you find a way around this, you'll have to keep your mirror looking up, at all times. So you either place it on the pole, in which case it will be looking at the same place for a very, very long time (until precession slowly moves it around). This is good for doing very deep fields, but hasn't much use otherwise since if there's nothing interesting to look at there, you're stuck there anyways.
Or you can place it anywhere else than the pole, but then you're never gonna look at a given object for more than a couple seconds.

A very good talk on this was given last Friday, 02/08/2008 on NPR's Science Friday.

You mean places where wildlife is currently allowed to congregate?

No. I suggest you listen to the interview. It's very good. What the author of the paper was referring to were lands already ruined by overfarming and no longer of any real agricultural value. He said studies using a mix of wild grasses and legumes like Indian grass and bluestem were the most productive and would put carbon back in the soil.

I don't mean to sound harsh, but biofuels are causing us to lose site [sic] of the bigger picture.

I couldn't agree more. The real problem is urban sprawl. Our cities need to be more compact with better public transportation. It has been suggested that the suburbs will be the ghettos of the not too distant future. Anyway it's all about finding sustainable solutions. And no one solution is going to be the answer. It'll have to be a mix of solar, wind, tidal, sustainable biofuels, and most important of saving energy.

I heard an interview with one of the authors on Science Friday. He said that if done wrong biofuels are bad, but if biofuels are grown on marginal land with the non-food crops it'll be a good thing. Their criticism was the way biofuels are being made now like from corn and soy and clearing forests for palm.

This idea is discussed in the book, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. It talks about all the different brain maps for the body, including how the map is stretched to include a tool that we're using. I haven't actually read the book, but I heard an interview on Science Friday.

The Helium market is an odd one... the gas is a by-product of mining Natural Gas. According to a recent science friday interview http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200710122 the supply/demand market is set for natural gas and not directly helium. In other words... it is not ecomomical to drill into natural gas mines solely for helium. At least not at current helium prices. So the production capacity is driven by the supply/demand needs for natural gas not directly helium.

Additionally, as others have pointed out, there are various refineries around the world that are under repair or otherwise offline.

It costs money. But what the Wal*Mart generation doesn't understand is that sometimes it's worth paying more. Lucky for you though, there are more options now to getting more naturally derived ingredients through specialty stores or even the local supermarket, so you should be able to find something somewhere.

This interview is apropos to your comment:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200801043

For example:

The Body Has A Mind of Its Own (broadcast Friday, December 21st, 2007)
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200712214
--
Toxic Homes and Household Toxins (broadcast Friday, December 14th, 2007)
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200712144
--
Exposed: the seven great medical myths
http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article3273183.ece
--
Testing Toys for Lead
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16951320

For example:

The Body Has A Mind of Its Own (broadcast Friday, December 21st, 2007)
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200712214
--
Toxic Homes and Household Toxins (broadcast Friday, December 14th, 2007)
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200712144
--
Exposed: the seven great medical myths
http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article3273183.ece
--
Testing Toys for Lead
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16951320

Interesting digression, Science Friday just had a piece on rewiring nerves for amputees.

    http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200711301

Yes, the lifespans are shorter, according to author Alan Weisman, who wrote _The_World_Without_us_

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200711231

And, maybe their lives are shorter BECAUSE of Leukemia and other cancers.

So, please, enlighten us as to where you're getting this idea that modern medicine is taught unscientifically, because as far as I can tell your notion is not based in reality.

Seems odd that they don't just salvage the analog components and connect it to a modern computer

I was just listening to a podcast interview with the original and current Voyager project team leaders, and the current team leader said that they are using newer (larger, 70m dish) antennas than they started with, and "over the years of course the receivers have gotten more sensitive".

While I agree with your statement that mailing yourself an envelope is useless, I don't think you could easily do what you said.

Every time I remember sending a registered mail, the post office stamped ink across the seams of the envelope - presumably to ensure that it wasn't opened.

But seriously, Slashdot is the worst place to get good legal advice. Yikes.

That said, there was a good article on the August 11th Talk of the Nation Science Friday called "What Inventors Need to Know". One of the guests emphasis was on securing a way to finance and market your idea rather than the actual protection of IP. But if you're really worried, he suggested getting a temporary patent for $100, which will cover you for a year.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Aug/hour2_ 081707.html

NPR Science Friday just had a presentation last Friday by Dr. Kay Bidle about measurements of microbial DNA in antarctic ice sheets. He found that although it was possible to revive some microbes from buried ice as old as 8 million years, the DNA became significantly degraded. The effective half-life for the DNA was about 1.1 million years, and this was for ice buried at the earth's surface, under the significant shielding effects of the atmosphere and the overburdening glacier. Cometary ice in space will be subjected to a much more intense radiation environment. The Bidle paper (appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) speculates that panspermia within our solar system may be possible, but tranfer from outside the solar system would be extremely unlikely.

There was a hurricane forecaster on NPR's Science Friday a few weeks back and he talked about this at length.

This same issue came up on a recent episode of NPR's Science Friday (look towards the right side of the page for an mp3 download link). Essentially, biologists were being encouraged by well-meaning people at the government agencies who sponsor them to avoid the word "evolution" so that their research remains uncontroversial and doesn't run afoul of any anti-science policy makers.

This latest article raises a good point, though. By trying to cloak discussion of evolution in other terms, anyone with a grasp of basic evolutionary biology is able to understand what is meant and how the process of natural selection applies to the problem at hand. Politicians and non-scientific observers not familiar with biology, however, don't see that evolution is explicitly referenced and so they don't raise a ruckus over it.

The problem is that this can help feed the general lack of understanding about evolution that creationists exploit. On the one hand, because most schools don't teach a rigorous curriculum on evolutionary biology, creationists can argue pseudo-scientific fallacies (e.g. that the second law of thermodynamics rules out evolution of increasingly complex species. Incidentally, this is false because the second law only applies to closed systems, and Earth's ecosystem continuously receives new energy from the Sun's light and heat). Additionally, because the fact that natural selection, as the basic organizing principle which has guided research in biology for over a century, isn't emphasized in new research reports that come out, many people don't realize that the huge advances we've made in our understanding of life on Earth over the past century, and the great medical breakthroughs that have emerged, nay, evolved from that understanding would not have been possible if we didn't understand evolution. Indeed, many things that we know to be true about biology simply couldn't be true if evolution weren't at work. That's not to say that it's a perfect theory, but like many good scientific theories it is revised and its precision is sharpened as new evidence becomes available (for example, we now know about cycles of punctuated equilibrium in the fossil record, and about patterns in human and other animal genomes, which Darwin didn't know about), in the same way that Einstein's relativity built on and refined Newton's laws of motion.

As loathe as many scientists are to do anything with public relations, I think that we have to do a better job of emphasizing the basic scientific theories behind today's research. So I encourage researchers out there to not be scared of using the word evolution, as it will hopefully contribute to people understanding that it is pervasively important to biology.

Except that I heard from http://www.sciencefriday.com/ (but can't remember exactly where) that there are issues with vitreous storage of nuclear waste. When the alpha radiation occurs what effectively happens is there is a kick on the atom releasing the alpha particle and this shakes the crystal lattice and over time it degrades the glass into something which is much less durable.
I'm all for Nuclear Power to play a part in the over all power generation system (maybe even a huge part) but we need to come up with more and better ideas about storage.
But even if we ignore that, a 20 minute drive to work in an electric car followed by recharging over 8 hours would be fine by me. But now we get the ability to travel hundreds of miles and get the car recharged whilst we stopping off at the services. Because I live in the UK, all I need now is some way of recharging overnight by catching the rainfall with a water wheel and I'll be able to drive for free. ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomn ia

I just listened to the Science Friday podcast with D.T. Max, who did a lot of investigations on Fatal Familial Insomnia, which sounds like it would be pretty devastating. Basically, one of the proteins mutates into a prion, which seems to convince other instances of the protein in the body to mutate as well. Eventually, the victim is totally unable to sleep and dies from exhaustion after 9 months or so.

The bitch of it is, the disease doesn't strike until the victim is in their 50's or so, making it pretty likely that the victim will have reproduced, which, according to that Wikipedia article, makes the offspring about 50% likely to catch whatever gene makes that happen. A lot of really terrible genetically transmitted diseases kill their victim at younger ages, so there's less of a chance that the victim has passed the disease on to their children, because they're less likely to have children at that age. But this thing lies dormant until later in life, which is why the one Italian family has such a family hstory of it. They keep on passing it on to their children.

Science Friday on NPR ran a segment on Bigfoot just a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, Bigfoot is plausible as a real creature. I'm not one of those "believers" either, and I was a bit upset when I looked at the title of the podcast, but Dr. Meldrum makes a compelling argument for the existence of Bigfoot.

Why not have the machine print out a human/machine readable ballot (names with bubbles filled next to your choices) and then have an optical scanner read the votes? This gives you a stack of ballots that can be hand counted if necessary. It eliminates people accidentally spoiling ballots (no hanging chads etc.). You don't have to worry about a bunch of votes getting digitally corrupted and being completely unrecoverable. You don't have privacy issues that can occur where an observer keeps track of who goes into the booth and then reviews the printed paper trail (assuming the trail is generated as people vote, it is trivial if tedious to figure out who voted for what/who).

This isn't my idea BTW. I first heard this suggestion on Science Friday interview with Avi Rubin:
http://avirubin.com/
http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2006/Oct/hour1_ 102706.html

I was listening to Science Friday the other day -- they had a segment about a security researcher's take on electronic voting. Essentially, he'd like to bag it whether it's open source or not because electronic voting makes recounts incredibly problematic. His suggestion was an electronic system that would generate a scanable ballot but play no part in counting/storing data. You look at your ballot, if it's right, you deposit it in the ballot box. A different machine would then scan and count ballots (we already have the scanners, the electronically generated ballot would simply be cleaner and more readily scanned than hand-filled ones). If an issue arose, the ballots could be recounted mechanically or by hand.

Here's the link to the show -- it's rather interesting and I think his arguments are persuasive: http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2006/Oct/hour1_ 102706.html