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I'm staggered by the /.ers who seem to think this is news.

The Space Elevator was first proposed in 1895! Technical details were being considered in the 1960s. A simple Google will provide lots of references - here's one for starters: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20021005/bob9. asp

You can see that different groups have been undertaking research and making proposals for most of a human lifetime.

Change in the Weather? Wind farms might affect local climates:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041016/fob7. asp

• physicstoday.org
• sciencenews.org
• http://www.eurekalert.org/

You mean like Science News?

Even glass flows.

ScienceNews article (2001) on Randomness of Pi's digits

Interesting work from Johan on Testing the a-periodic randomness of and comparing it with a Quantum Mechanical source.

But are the digits truely random ? In 1996, NERSC Chief Technologist David H. Bailey, together with Canadian mathematicians Peter Borwein and Simon Plouffe, found a new formula for pi. This formula permits one to calculate the n-th binary or hexadecimal digits of pi, without having to calculate any of the preceding n-1 digits. This formula was discovered by a computer, using Bailey's implementation of Ferguson's PSLQ algorithm

Given that its possible to compute any digit of pi without computing the preceding digits its not surprising that the digits have structure. The bizarre part of this algorithm is that computes digits in hexadecimal.

It's much slower than traditional orbital transfers, but so much cheaper that it's worth using. It's already been used on SMART and Galileo:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050416/bob9. asp (even mentions using it for Jupiter moon exploration!)

http://www.ufoindia.org/news_intsuperhighway.htm

This article describes a GMO rice that is herbicide resistant. Scientists spliced in a human enzyme that is very effective at crunching toxins to create rice that can withstand a wider variety of weed-killers. This lets farmers rotate their weedkillers to reduce the chance that the weeds evolve resistance.

The GMO rice provides two other important environmental benefits. First, the new enzyme is so efficient at detoxifying the herbicide that the resulting rice is relatively herbicide free (non-modified rice contains 20X more residual herbicide). Second, the GMO rice extracts herbicide from the soil, meaning less herbicide in run-off.

Is Google to difficult?

link

This is common knowledge here, but judging from the products I see coming from the US I guess you're a bit behind.

Buckyballs are not my big concern. Nanotubes, are structuraly similar to asbestos fibers, that is thin and stiff and very small.

If buckyballs are regulated like soot, by that logic, nanotubes should be regulated like asbestos.

However, it is unclear whether the hazards of asbestos fibers are solely a function of dimension. One early study suggests that nanotubes may not be all that hazardous. On the other hand, there is a long history of human health hazards from dusts, ranging from mineral to agricultural, so I'd be hesitant to presume that a nanotube dust is safe. It is probably a good general policy to minimize inhalation of fine powders, nanotechnological or otherwise.

http://www.redwhiteandblue.org/news/bs&t/SEESIGHT. HTM Sorry I know its not the best link buts its the only one I could find. They already have technologies that transmit visual data via your other senses. Some of the research is kinda interesting. Just though you might want to know.

Actually I also found this article which is alot better http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010901/bob14 .asp.

They created something that behaves like a black hole. If the theory about dark energy stars is right, it could have been a ball of dark energy instead.

IAAP (I am a physicist), and I'm annoyed that this is modded "Informative".

The RHIC collaboration at Brookhaven has fewer pion jets than their complicated Monte Carlo simulations say should exist. One possible (and highly attention-getting) explanation is analogous to a black hole, in the same way that "slow light" experiments can create something analogous to an event horizon. Neither experiment is actually creating a black hole , in the sense of a quantity of matter compressed to a region smaller than its Schwarzchild radius.

Regarding the original article, it's interesting speculation, but without any evidence to support it yet. For those interested in some of its underlying ideas (e.g. the vacuum as a superfluid), I strongly recommend Bob Laughlin's new popular book (readable by nonphysicists!) on the subject, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down.

I'd encourage you to look at Science News. It's about $54 a year for a weekly magazine, which is twice as much as Scientific American. It's weekly, and I think around 16 pages, so you're getting only 64 pages a month, but there's a lot less advertising than SciAm.

But more importantly, the science reporting is a lot better. They usually report from the original journal articles in peer-reviewed journals, or from scientific conferences. When a science story comes out in the news I scan it but I don't believe it until it comes out in Science News. They don't just rewrite press releases (like most newspapers) and they certainly don't take the Wired approach of presenting scientific advances as being available at Target any day now.

Each issue contains two long-format articles that do run closer to the Scientific American model, which I think of as being more forward-looking than actual news. Sometimes they'll use them to examine one reasonably-current topic (like DNA testing) in depth, presenting an overview of the field and where the next likely advances are coming. Not blue-sky stuff, but reporting on the state of scientific research.

But the most important thing about Science News for me is that it's a weekly look at real science conducted by scientists, written for technically-minded laymen. The articles are usually around a half-page, containing a summary of the research. It's where the real work in science gets done. Waiting for it to come out in Scientific American is often months, which is dull for the kind of everyday advances made by scientists who do work (as opposed to the people who wonder if it means we're going to have time travel).

I read both SciAm and Science News, but the latter I read almost immediately whereas the former I scan and maybe get back to later.

No I'm not. Inflation predicted that the expansion would be slowing by now, not accelerating. Calling the discovery of the acoustic peaks in the CMBR "good experimental support" for inflation is quite a stretch.

M-theory? Don't make me laugh. M-theory can produce about a billion different scenarios for the Big Bang...

Not ones that produce mathematically sound models.

If the CMBR spectrum and dark energy can be simultaneously described by introducing one simple new field (the inflaton), parsimony gives that the win over M-theory.

I call bullshit. Inflation IS inelegant. It doesn't provide any clue to the cause of the big bang, and the conditions that could cause inflation aren't explained.

I don't know why you would support such an untenable position and completely dismiss a theory that can produce such elegant models like described here.

This reminds me of the DepthX submarine which was described in a recent issue of Wired. The probe would drop down, melt through the ice, and then autonomously search for hydrothermal activity on the sea floor.

The group working on it is currently putting together a version to explore and search for life in a rather hostile water-filled cave in Mexico. They've got a progress report here, with many details and pictures.

Some other links related to a Europa probe:

http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/archive/design/europa/
http://www.cosmographica.com/gallery/portfolio/por tfolio351/pages/352-EuropaProbe.htm (neat painting)
http://www.cascadia.ctc.edu/facultyweb/instructors /jvanleer/astro%20sum01/astro101/missions_to_europ a.htm
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20021102/fob3r ef.asp

Scientific articles:

The Challenge of Landing on Europa
Possible ecosystems and the search for life on Europa
others

Maybe wild shrimp toting sonofusion-powered sonic stun beams will crush our enemies!

That was the old thought. For years now, scientists have been doubting that theory. The work with the digital life has shown that, while it confers more genetic variety, it also allows more genetic damage to collect.

Sexually reproducing organisms do not do any better under most simulation conditions.

Recent studies of giardia have shown that this ancient organism has the genes for sexual reproduction. Apparently, sexual reproduction conferred some powerful advantage, given how early it developed in the history of life. But if this is so, why does giardia not actually use sexual reproduction? The genes are there - they have just never been seen to be activated. In all the conditions so far observed, giardia reproduces asexually. If the advantage of sexual reproduction is so great, why did giardia give it up?

Enquiring minds, etc.

Although M$ churns out mundane but fairly good software as the main line of business, this company has a huge R&D budget, and the central research laboratory at M$ is the equivalent of the old Bell Laboratory. I suspect that the M$ laboratory is not confined to only software research. There is likely small, upstart efforts exploring other technologies.

Certainly, X-Box took me by surprise as, up to its debut, I had always thought of M$ as a software company.

May be, there is something to the warning: "Resistance [in any technology] is future. You will be assimilated."

> There are only two possible positions. Either something can act on the
> system (life, the universe and everything) from "outside" (God, or whatever
> you want to call it), or the system has starting conditions, rules, and is
> working itself out mathematically.
>
> If you choose option two, you are throwing away the illusion of choice and
> free will. You may believe you are making decisions in your life, but they
> are mathematically preordained. Your choice of college, career, spouse, or
> breakfast cereal are just the result of particles interacting according to
> preset rules.

Let's leave the uncertainty principle for a moment and consider the following, simplistic example:

You have three point-sized objects moving in vaccum.
The only force acting on the objects is gravity.
The system is closed -- there are no outside influences.

Given the objects' mass, position and velocity, you should be able to predict their position at any time, right? After all, it is only math and such a simple problem should be easy to solve, right?

Well, if this simple three-body problem was proven to have no general solution and can only be approximated by numerical methods, how can we determine the behaviour of such complex systems as human beings?

And if a solution cannot be determined, does it really matter whether it exists?

Let's say that I ask you to pick a number.
Then I tell you that your choice is predetermined by math equations but they are so complex that they cannot be soved. Not now, not ever.
In effect, we know that your choice is predetermined but nobody knows, nor will ever know, what it will be.

So, for all practical purposes, your choice will appear to be completely random (or based on "choice and free will") to any observer, including yourself.

Thus the "illusion of choice and free will".

And if the illusion is so complete as to be indistinguishable from the real thing by any method, is it really an illusion? And is the "real thing" really real?

How do you know that you are not living in a virtual reality? That you are not just a brain in a jar, laced with electrodes supplying electrical stimuli?
Answer: you don't.

But is there is absolutely no way of being sure, should it make any difference?

Oh, by the way, even if "something can act on the system from outside", how do you know that this "something" didn't rig the game? The mere existance of an omnipotent entity does not imply that you have any more "choice and free will" than, say, the sun, the wind or the sea.

> I know which I believe, but it frustrates me that the science bullies here
> can't or won't follow their logic to its cold, heartless end.

What is better, to be governed be the laws of science or to be a puppet, operated by an entity who's whims and motives you cannot even guess?

> All science is a slave to math.

All religion is a slave to fear.

Just recently researchers have succeded in replacing the pacemaker cells in rat hearts with similar cells taken from embronic rats. They installed the new cells, then destroyed the original cells and the heart continued to beat. Pretty cool because the new cells respond to the signals that cause them to increase the heart rate when required. Its possibly useful because the new cells can be grown from stem cells.

I think Science News had the article. Not availble online though.

Oh really no idea what I'm talking about eh? Its been known for over half a century that alpha radiation is dangerous. Get a fucking clue and stop posting misinformation and falsehoods as if they were true.

People like to say "you are more likely to die in a car than in a plane", because lots more people die in car crashes than in plane crashes,...

People like to say it because commercial aviation (the only kind most of us realistically have access to) is much safer than flying. For every 100,000,000 miles traveled by car we see about 1.7 deaths. For every 100,000,000 miles traveled by commericial aviation, we see about 0.7 deaths. (source) Even including the September 11th attacks research shows flying is much safer than driving. So if you're planning your trip across country, you are about twice as safe flying than driving. (Of course, in both cases the odds of dying are very small.) Flying is not a risky activity by any realistic measure. Noting the apparently large number of famous people who died in airplanes is a distraction. First, many of these people aren't flying commercial airlines like the rest of us. The numbers are very different if you're flying yourself or on a special flight. Those are special cases, including them is like including crashes in Nascar races in driving safety measurements. Second, any death by flight gets much more coverage than an auto death, especially if someone famous is involved. We're getting distorted news. Third, famous people tend to fly more. If you exclusively fly your chances of getting in an auto accident are zero. It's still safer than if you'd chosen to travel those miles by car.

Older version of tongue interface.

University of Montreal news release

But wait, there's more cooler brain interfacing going on! Mystic Visions

I see, in the very near future, big wads of $100 bills moving into my pocket from users of the APE(TM) helmet. A Psychedelic Experience! Users don the APE helmet and the core moderating frequencies of the brain are modulated to produce everything from the mystic experience (sans the nasty side effects of peyote, psylocibin, or X) to a full blown emulation of a trip on the finest of Dr. Hofmann's concotions.

Franchise options available NOW!

animals do communicate, with a vocabulary - just not ours, see recent studies on dog communications

http://www.interspecies.com/pages/who.html

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040612/fob2. asp

I'm a "religious thinker" and this didn't take long

I think we've discovered the cause of your problem.

Bravo! I love this kind of article, and wish there were far more of them.

We in the sciences need to fight our tendency to suppress the embarrassing history of mistaken scoffing; where new discoveries are rejected because if they were real, they'd make the scientific community look like fools. Suppress? Yes. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And it may not be conscious suppression, but the effects are the same. If we take a detailed look at the history of science, it's quite fascinating to see which discoveries were ridiculed at the time. And it's amazing that this ridicule is not common knowledge. Perhaps historians of science need to focus more on digging up dirt, rather than letting scientists tell their own sanitized version of history. For example, try to find any texts which mention:

String Theory
rejected by the wider community, kept alive almost entirely by Caltech's John Schwartz, the "pariah of the physics department," who only avoided being fired because of secret support by Murray Gell-Mann. The work was set back ~10 years by widespread sneering. See "Feynman's Rainbow," also "Euclid's Window"

Black Holes
Proposed in 1930 by S. Chandra, who was hounded out of his department by Arthur Eddington and supporters, since black holes would ruin one of Eddington's theories (later proved wrong.) The work was only taken up again in the 1960s, so Eddington's actions set black hole research back by thirty years.

Scanning-tunneling microscope.
Ridiculed by the microscope community. Apparently the project avoided setbacks mostly because its discoverers attracted early support by the Nobel prize committee. See Science News, Atom Tinkerer's Paradise

Non-euclidian geometry
The field was explored by K. F. Gauss, who fearing ridicule, kept all his papers secret until the end of his life. Lobachevsky did some similar work and did attract scorn. The topic was finally taken seriously after several more decades passed. Doppler effect.
Proposed in 1842, but ridiculed and ignored because it contradicted the Aether theory of light. Stellar red shift finally penetrated the wall of scorn two decades later (after Doppler himself had died.)

---------

Other more famous instances of ridiculed/vindicated discoveries:

Lynn Margulis, mitochondria, chloroplasts, etc., were once independant cells. Barbara McClintlok's "jumping genes"

Robert Goddard, finally vindicated when those idiotic spaceships of his were taken seriously by Nazi scientists.

Weltner's continental drift theory

Wright Brothers. Ridiculed by top US scientists and Scientific American magazine, they finally had to move to France before anyone would believe their claims or even come to observe their machine in action.

Arrhenius, ion chemistry. Nearly lost his degree because ions were a heresy (atoms were known to be indivisible.)

Ignaz Semmelweis, doctors should wash hands before surgery. (Semmelweis fought the medical community for ~10 years, and ended up committing suicide in an insane asylum.)

L. Galvani, electricity. "They call me the frogs' dancing master."

W. Harvey, circulation of blood. The medical community ostracized him.

, so perhaps they should stop reporting on new studies altogether.

Indeed. One problem that seems to stand out is that journalists seem to have an idea that science is merely opinion of self-proclaimed experts. This is especially clear in the old evolution debate, where most reporting makes it clear that "theory" is a synonym for "opinion". But this comes out in all sorts of science reporting. This pretty much tells us that the journalists are clueless about science.

Anyone with an interest in science should be looking at scientific news sources. There's no shortage of them. Of course, the best do tend to require a subscription (aka membership), as they rarely get much money from advertisers.

Every once in a while, you find a journalist who understands scientific methods. But the approach of the media corporations to such people is all too often as described in this article: The editors mandate a fake "balance" that forces the good journalists to treat pseudo-science as the equal of real science.

So don't bother. Go to the real scientific sources. If you want just summaries of breaking scientific news, suscribe to Science News. Lots of brief summaries of scientific news stories, and they usually tell you where to find the primary articles.

You probably already know the good sites for your specialties ...

There are meny more issues to wind power than most people think. There is no such thing as "free" energy, and a wind plant must take its energy from somewhere, namely the lower atmosphere. Modeling large wind farns show that they can have large local climate changeing effects, and we already know that they can desimate local bird and bat populations. Wind power is far from "clean" and serious care must be made in building wind farms. On a more positive note, reaserch into off shore wind farms looks good, and much of the climate impact is tied to the design of the wind farm. Two more promaseing technologies, in my opinion, are fusion, expected to reach economic viability in 2025, and solar, with plants being constructed now. wind farm impact study href="http://www.natwindpower.co.uk/northhoyle/nor thhoyle.pdf">Offshore Wind Farm A Solar Tower Project

What I want to know is, can you fold this stuff more than 8 times?

Remember, the goal of this is ... to perfect genetic engineering.

The stem-cell work right now appears to be concentrated on two fronts:

• Finding out what makes a stem cell, period; if we can create them from other cells, all the ethical complaints go away.
• Finding ways to use them to cure disease, build replacements for damaged organs and tissues, and so forth. This is why researchers built the framework of an ear under the skin of a mouse not long ago.

Being innerested in protein folding I saw an article on Blue Gene being invented to be used for simulating the folding of a protein with the full use of quantum mechanic calculations. The computer was to be so fast it would take just one year of execution time to simulate a full fold.

A few years the fastest supercomputers were being built to simulate atomic explosions including the first computer to break the teraflops barrier.

The Earth Simulator was built for peaceful purposes. Blue Gene is in name motivated by genetics.

I know atomic bombs explode and kill a lot of people. Those things work. I want to know how proteins fold. Are we to understand that funding for supercomputer research must be driven by the arms race?

How do you respond to accusations from Democrats that a vote for your party is a vote for George Bush?

He supports instant runoff voting. I prefer approval voting myself, since it's a bit simpler, but almost anything would be better than plurality voting.

-jim

Check out this article in Science News recently. They're investigating the way various aquatic animals move through the water. One of these is, in fact, the penguin, for its agility and manuverability in the water.

This announcement was premature, at best. It is not responsible science.

The planet is not yet confirmed as such. It could very easily be a background star. This has happenned before, and the scientists got an awful lot of egg on their faces. Another unconfirmed "planet" image can be seen here, this one around a white dwarf.

The responsible thing to do is wait a few years to determine if the objects have common proper-motions--if they move through the sky together, they are probably physically linked, and one can determine that the companion object really is a planet. Without this confirmation, the simplest explanation is not that it is a planet.

Many teams of astronomers have images of planet candidates like this one. The responsible astronomers are the ones you aren't hearing from yet--the ones waiting to verify they have planets.

The press-release title should be "A dim spot imaged near a brown dwarf." Any further conclusions have no basis.

It was a tongue-in-cheek project by three engineers at SGI. The original server's been taken off the Internet, but there's some history at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010505/matht rek.asp. Enjoy.

A better one is here where Lava lamps are used to generate true random bits.

Too bad the website for it appears to be off line. SGI used to be cool, too...

Glass may flow, but it does so very very very slowly. As in "age of the entire universe" slowly.

DDT was banned when? 1972. It takes how long to break down? 15 years. If DDT were the source of egg-shell thinning we would have seen an increase in egg shell thickness around 1987.

We didn't.

2003 USDA study, DDT/DDE concentrations are not linked to shell breakage in condors

1998 - Science News - Shell thinning in birds predates DDT.

In just about every study on DDT/DDE you will note that DDT wasn't the only artifical compound found. It was usually accompanied by high concentrations of PCBs, mercury, and/or lead.

Adding CO2 means reducing alkalinity, which makes carbonate less stable in the oceans. This may have serious effects on marine organisms which use carbonate in their skeletons; see here for a brief news item. Science News has run several articles on the subject, but none appear to be on-line; here are the references from one of them.

Science News is an excellent source for recent stories about science-related topics (even better than Slashdot most of the time, I think :).

Everything I subscribe to was on the list:
The Economist
Reason
Science News

But there are some really intriguing ones on that list. I was tempted.

In addition to New Scientist, you can usually find good stuff on the same topic in Science News, Scientific American, Nature, and Science, to name a few.

Photosynthetic organisms make excellent use of this energy

The evidence comes from the fact that older stars must fuse carbon, nitrogen and oxygen into helium, unlike their younger bretheren that fuse pure hydrogen. The slowest part of the carbon-nitrogen-oygen reaction comes during the collision of a proton with a nitrogen-14 nucleus. Using particle accelerators to mimic the interior of older stars they have determined that the reaction occurs half as fast as estimated.

Two research teams, one from the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Padova, Italy, and the other from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have performed nearly identical experiments and their prelimiary results agree, although their findings have not yet been published.

You can read the abstract here out of Nature Magazine.

Try to get mentally naked for a second and strip off your political hat and think with me. How do you measure the temperature of the earth? Take a measurement of the air? Or, take enough measurements from the ocean's bottom, away from geothermal zones, to create an overall picture of the ocean's temperature.

We might be spicing things up with the atmosphere, don't mistake me about that, but we are not substantively warming the planet. If you want to talk air pollution, think back to the fires in 2003 in California, or 2002 in Colorado/Arizona. Or, my personal favorite, one kick-bang volcanic eruption. I had the distinct pleasure of discussing this very topic with a park ranger (the unforgettable, effervescent Ranger Chet, or something like that) at Mt. St. Helens last year. As a species, we cannot compete with the pollution of a catastrophic volcanic eruption.

I have thought for a long time that global warming was bunk. The only reason to get off of oil (in America) is that it isn't exactly renewable. I suppose the same argument could be made for nuclear energy, except for the fact that we can manufacture the fissive material. Hydroelectric (dam kind, not ocean current kind) is clearly an environmental disaster, and solar still uses noxious chemicals in its production, and is about as unfriendly as a traditional circuit board to the environment. If we can get energy efficiently from biology, then that's the way to go, because it is renewable and scalable. I am left to wonder how efficient this 80% via turkey fat really is, though. They heat and pump, heat and pump, but what is the energy intake to energy output here?

No increased hypertension (they checked).

I'm an insurance agent. If you skip your morning coffee before a paramedic exam (typically administered when buying large face amounts of life insurance), your BP reading will be 5-10 points lower than if you don't skip it.

I checked that one personally. I can believe that long-term usage doesn't necessarily increase hypertension, but the short-term effects certainly would make it appear to!

BTW, as I mentioned elsewhere, Science News ran a recent article on coffee, and found some health enhancements -- for decaf.

But there is also evidence that coffee drinkers are less likely to develop serious health conditions, including diabetes and Parkinson's disease.

There was an article in Science News a couple of weeks ago on this. Turns out the folks that get the most health boost from coffee drink decaf.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20031206/bob9. asp

Actually it's a different concept than the F-14 (skim the above article for more info).

DARPA's been working on this for a while, a friends dad just left the project.

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Eyeball yoyo
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