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Well, if time is the 4th dimension, then, taking the hypercube example, a 3D cube is the "shadow" of the 4-dimensional hypercube. How can "time" cast a shadow? And you'd still have to, in 4 or 5 or however many dimensions, measure "rate of change" of those objects, which leaves you with time as a separate thing altogether.

What exactly is the "physics of time" if not the physics of "observation of change, the rate of which being measured against observations of other changes"?

That is to say, we conceptualise time as "rate of change". But the only way to measure how quickly something is changing or moving, is to compare it with something else which is changing. IMO there's no such thing as "measuring time", only change in relation other change - chemical changes in the brain relate to sensation of time.

An interesting read about time-challenged patients. :)
http://www.unisci.com/stories/20011/0227013.htm

The most experientially direct form of time is memory. We measure time by how it feels - yesterday has a different feeling to last week. Why? Perhaps our concept of time is something to do with memory access, but I'm sure we'll find out eventually. A dream is like wading through a memory - a visualisation - but it has the tag of "now". Memories have tags that "feel old". There's probably a mechanism for that in the brain.

So is there any real reason we can say time is an actual property of the universe, external to us?

cover it in goatse and the problem is solved

Black carbon (soot) is known to both cool and warm the regional climate. See this article. I don't know which effect wins in Beijing. In TFA, Ramanathan says it's a net cooling, and he's pretty famous in this area so I'll believe it. (It's not just black carbon but also sulfate aerosols in air pollution which cool.)

Whereas this might be the first glow in the dark cat (for which I can think of many, many uses), there have been glow in the dark mice for ages (although now I wonder for how much longer). Also many animal models for human genetic diseases already exist, including fruitfly with early onset Alzheimer's disease, and mice with Down syndrome. I'm sure there are tons more.

You raise an interesting point. Actually, it raises multiple interesting points.

About monkeys themselves - humans are not considered to have evolved from monkeys but the great apes. Specifically, chimpanzees are supposed to be our close ancestors.

http://www.unisci.com/stories/20013/0712011.htm

The earliest chimpanzee fossils date from 500000 years ago near fossils of Homo erectus or Homo rhodensiensis. So it is considered that chimpanzees and Homo erectus were contemporaries.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7917

This raises the interesting question as to how chimpanzees have remain largely unchanged while humans have evolved from Homo heidelbergensis to Homo sapiens? Interestingly, Homo erectus and early modern humans (Homo sapiens) are considered to have been contemporaries atleast for a while since a finding of fossils in Java (considered Homo erectus) is dated as late as 50,000 years ago.

http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/erec. html

Homo erectus had a brain capacity about 30% less than modern humans (1000cc vs 1300+ cc in homo sapiens) but they did not outlive even Chimpanzees in the same area. That raises a whole lot of questions about the theories which define why some species survive and some don't.

• Malaria and other diseases
• heatwave deaths
• water quality

As for pasteurisation, people should surely have the choice whether they want to be able to eat cheese made from pasteurised milk or not.

"It isn't like there is no reason for it".

Perhaps there are good reasons to pasteurise, but you ever tried cheese made from raw milk? These cheeses taste better and when it comes down to it, if I wanna take a risk, surely it is up to me to decide.

Sigh. The brain do grew new ones. Quite old knowledge. If the brains stop doing them, you get a depression. Exercise increases the rate. Google, or something.

I did: see No evidence of new neurons in adult primate neocortex, among others. The general consensus seems to be that some areas of the brain have some capability to generate new neurons, but there's no evidence that it can happen in the neocortex, which is a pretty critical part... Though if you can point me to more recent research that contradicts this, please do.

How about 100 GB of storage capacity for the cost of a memory card ? Magnetic microchips used in cell phones could make them fully functional video cameras. In addition, the chips are non-volatile, so startup lag will become a not-so-fond memory. They use much less power than electronic chips. They can be made much smaller, possibly as small as a few atoms. The examples they have already fabricated "use no silicon and require no multilayer processing and so can be manufactured at very low cost on flexible substrates, while offering non-volatility, radiation hardness and several hundreds of MHz of bandwidth" . They're talking about plastic chips. Pretty impressive.

The technology, which is still being developed, can be classified as "nanotech" and is called "magnetic domain-wall logic" and is based on spintronics. Lots of folks are working on this because many believe that spintronics will allow for great advances in areas from quantum computing to DNA based molecular electronic devices. This particular development is important because it represents the first actual construction of logic gates, which are the basis of computing. So far the group has produced a "NOT gate" and a "11-stage serial shift register / digital frequency divider" in a 200nm design rule. They have also demonstrated the transfer of magnetic information without the use of magnetic fields. This paves the way for hybrid chips with both electronic and spintronic components. Such "3D chips" could contain many times the amount of information possible with current electronic chips. They will run cooler, with short "nanowire" pathways, and have the potential to surpass the performance of silicon chips. Moore's Law marches on.

billy - wonder if the "$100 laptop" guys have their phone number?

It may not be worth spotting early if it turns out to be curable after the fact, which it might ultimately be. Though I would imagine that if swelling of the pancreas can be spotted on an MRI, so can a lot of other things they haven't yet thought to look for. This might end up being a broad, multi-purpose diagnostic that is cost-justified because it eliminates so many other procedures.

I can see it going either way. :/

Mal-2

I know of a very close friend who lost out to a med-school... she found out later it was influenced by her tattoos.

In the context of medical school this may have been more about lack of judgement than odd appearance, as this and many other articles, illustrate.

I don't know about individual off-grid use, but this idea has been used commercially. Here's one link.

There's also a compressed-air car.

Well, I wouldn't count Europa out to fast.
It might well hold some surprises.

No, you're thinking about nulling interferometry, which is also very cool. :-)

What they're doing is a bit more straightforward. When you observe a point source with HST, the diffraction of the light off the supports and mirror give you a somewhat complicated not-really-symmetric pattern called the Point Spread Function (PSF). To detect a faint source right near a bright source, you need to subtract off the bright star, which means you need to know the PSF really really well so that you don't mistake some leftover light that's really from the primary as a companion.

What they're doing is observing the same field twice, once rotated slightly. The PSF doesn't depend on how the field is oriented, so faint spots that are rotated are real while ones that aren't rotated are due to instrumental effects. This means you can look at much fainter things and know if they're real or not.

To answer the original question, it will be harder the brighter the primary is... I don't know exactly what they're limits are, but it may be possible to push it to brighter stars. Working in the near-infrared, which they're doing, will help. But white dwarfs are pretty faint, so I'm not sure how much brighter a star you could get away with.

[TMB]

Yes, research on impact craters indicates the icy crust of Europa may be 3 or 4 Km thick.

"30% faster" means 1.3x the speed, right? It certainly does not mean 0.3x. "300% faster", then, means 4x the speed. "3 times faster" should also therefore mean 4x the speed.

In that first link you gave, the author says "three times as fast" in the body of the article, not "three times faster." "Three times as fast" means "one third the time," as I stated. (Whoever wrote the title line got it wrong. The author of the article uses "three times as fast" consistently throughout.) In that second link, they use "two to three times faster" to mean "200% to 300% increase", which means 1/3rd to 1/4th the required time, again consistent with my original post. (If you disagree with my interpretation of that second link's text, then do think that the "35% faster" note in the table implies a slowdown? They mention "two times faster" referring to values over 200% in their table, and so on.)

The reason I state it is ambiguous is that most people make the same mistake you did in the body of your post. "Three times faster" means 1/4th the time is required, not 1/3rd, even though many people use it to mean 1/3rd the time is required. "Three times as fast" means 1/3rd the time is required.

"Times faster" would imply "in addition to the baseline"

It implies no such thing. "Three times faster" means in exactly one third of the original time needed. There is no ambiguity.

This is the usage found in all English writing, including scientific literature and networked file-sharing benchmarks.

How do you get rid of nasty infections? Autoclave! Heat things up enough to smoke out all those nasty hoomins and things can get back to normal around here.

As for volcanos, it looks like the production of CO/CO2 in eruptions can have an effect on global warming. It turns out, however, that the ash/SO2 released into the atmosphere has a cooling effect. It also helps scatter sunlight, allowing for more robust tree growth which leads to more carbon being taken out of the atmosphere.

So, all we need to happen is for the Yellowstone (NetBSD) volcano to erupt (supposed to be violent enough to wipe out hoomanity) and fill the skys with enough ash and SO2 to bring on Fimbulwinter to slow down global warming. Or have a big rock smack into the Indian Ocean.

I had heard the same thing watching Discovery channel one night... a quick Google query brings me this study on the perception of time, where researchers were measuring brain patterns as the subject tries to perceive a delay between two sounds. The thing on Discovery were measuring a subject who was supposed to push a button while watching a clock, and to push it at exactly the top of the minute. What they found was that the brain begins firing the neurons to the arm a few seconds before, an "anticipation" burst, followed by the observation by the eyes of the clock. Then you have the nerves firing from the arm telling the spine that the arm is moving and the button is pressed.

The brain organizes all of the input (clock + feedback from muscles) so the brain perceives that all of the actions happened at the same time, but in reality, the arm is actually moving earlier than the top of the minute, but it takes the brain some time to realize that the arm has moved.

There are three types of neutrinos: electron, muon and tau, each having a different characteristic mass and energy spectrum. The experimentally measured flux of solar electron neutrinos based upon the solar nuclear fusion reactions turned out to be too low by ~50% based on the theoretical GUT and QED calculations. As a means of explaining the apparent discrepancy, it had been postulated that neutrinos are capable of "oscillating" between types over distance and time, thereby affecting the number of measured events (the experimental measurement being limited to certain energies). However, theory suggests that in order to oscillate, the neutrino must have mass.

Ingenious experiments now seem to confirm that what was once considered a massless particle does indeed have mass, albeit vanishingly small.

Since neutrinos are produced in stellar fusion reactions and supernova explosions, etc., in very great quantities (the flux here on Earth is estimated to be over 10^10/cm^2/sec), they would be expected to be in a higher density in the vicinity of galaxies, and thereby could account for a large part of the "missing matter" holding galaxies together.

I think this is what the NPR story was referring to ... but maybe not.

A couple of links:

Physics Web articleon neutrinos.
Super-Kamiokande at UC Irvine Neutrino page.
UniSci article on oscillation.
The confirmation of Solar Fusion by neutrino detection 2002 Nobel Prize press release.

Essentially, the embryonic stem cells have failed to produce very promising results because of rejection or tumor formation (in many cases). Adult stem cells, which are pluripotential (not totipotential), have no rejection problems because they are autologously donated. Searching Google on "bone marrow stem cells" produces a variety of results, like this plea for funding from a Russian biologist: Why cloning? or this from Science Daily or Bone Marrow Stem Cells can become almost anything.

Perhaps scientists and engineers should consider porous silicon rather than glass (well, at least at this stage in the game [glass infancy]).

I remember recently reading about a new sensor based on porous silicon. Apparently, it has a unique metallization process that is very sensitive. Moreover, it uses less power and is, overall, cheaper to create and maintain.

There's a nice article at http://unisci.com/stories/20021/0313025.htm that touches on some of these issues. It should make for a good read, especially if you're not a total expert on silicon applications in engineering.

Very interesting.

Studies have shown that several types of SIV could replicate in human lymphocytes, thus suggesting that a potential for human contamination exists, or even for an HIV-3 to appear. [More]

Yes, neutrinos have been proven to have mass. So what the hell are they talking about in this story???
From the article:

"There's a lot of hints and clues (that neutrinos have mass), but we can't find the body yet," Marshak explained. "It's possible to convict someone of murder without a body, but it's a lot easier with it."

Other experiments have already produced some evidence of neutrino oscillation, but so far there has been no firm demonstration of the phenomenon.

So what is this article about? I'm confused...

And twice in other parts of this subject I've posted links backing that up, so I might as well post one here to re-affirm what he said, if you don't believe us check out this link.

Kintanon

We're beyond any discussions on whether global warming is real or not. We have conclusive, undeniable evidence collected from many unrelated scientific surveys showing that global temperatures are rising.



Show me.

All of the data I have seen indicates a stable global temperature over the last few hundred years. This study is an example. There are more out there. The global climate is not altering significantly. There have been some extreme local swings though, which people are erroneously attributing to global warming when it's anything but global.

Kintanon

Bad me for replying to myself, but here is a link to check out if you don't believe me.
Climate Study

Kintanon

Being as UCSC is in HP's backyard (well, AMD's, too...) I was a bit taken aback that it's not HP.

But it's almost as good as the guy who's trying to measure the distance to the moon in millimeters.

Here is another article about electronic spin based computing. It clearly explains, toward the end, what will be the practical applications of those experiments.

An Intro to Spintronics - Univ. of Maryland

Article on Unisci about research into electronic spin in electronic devices

Maybe it's just my browser, but I think the story is being parsed so that the story doesn't work.
try this.

That link should be http://unisci.com/stories/20013/0702016.htm.

the real url is http://unisci.com/stories/20013/0702016.htm brian

Is fixed here.

So, dig this: suppose the time-frame of compulsory education has been hiked up for the purpose of keeping children off the job market longer, so as to not devalue labor and thereby devalue the labor system.

Suppose the compulsory educational system, which is economically (and therefore ideologically) linked to every other industry, is regearing to keep the middle class from further expanding and gaining power.

Suppose that, with all the psychological research that's been done, someone actually thought ahead and said, "Okay, if we can institutionalize middle-class children within the first 2 decades of their life, we'll be able to not only increase the size of the prison-industrial-military complex, but also to grab more power for ourselves and our friends overall" Just the same way some retailer once said, "Let's hire some of these behavioral psychologists to figure out how to organize the store in the most influential possible way[s]."

The net effect of our compulsory school system is obvious: 23% illiteracy in America, 13% prevalence of social phobia, Major depression (18.9%), generalized anxiety (14.8%), and the 'Suicide Rate Among U.S. Teens Keeps Increasing'.

And I nearly left out the continuous rise in teenage violence...

You see, the problem is, as Adam Yauch is quoted in the last link, that "Being on either end of a violent situation, whether you seem to have come out with the upper hand or whether you don't seem to, it doesn't resolve anything. It escalates the problem. Hatred leads to more hatred. Violence leads to more violence." Violence is not by any means limited to its overt outbreaks; it is a sadist/masochistic cycle which perpetuates itself. Our "educational" system suffers the Disney syndrome: the violence of management over the tenderness of interaction.

"Nature once had a chance to run riot in South Florida, producing jungles and swamps; now nature must submit to control. " And nature (which, yes children, is very much alive in each and every one of us) is pissed.

________________________________________________ __

Did you guys catch the really cool part about this proposal? Entangled photon pairs react in such a way that when the state of one photon is changed, the other is changed instantly. Therefore this is not just quantum encrypted communication, but quantum encrypted communication faster than the speed of light.

If you want to read a to read a far less pseudo-science description of this phenomenon, may I suggest the unisci article. There's a good article on the whole entanglement phenomenon at Daily Insight here.

p.s. "spooky action at a distance" was Einstein's phrase for it...

Gee, that's too bad. They're using bad data. Ocean temperatures are higher than air temps. Thus those studies which use air temperatures over land and ocean temperatures over ocean are using temps which are higher than true air temps.

The short version, of course, is that nobody ever really concluded that "bumblebees can't fly". They merely concluded that they couldn't explain bumblebee flight by thinking of bees as little airplanes. Put another way, bumblebees cannot glide, and we could show that with equations before anybody ever tried to demonstrate it with a real bee. The mystery is solved

What the article doesn't explain very well is that this is the (or one of the?) smallest BH found. There has been a lot of speculation that small galaxies contained small BHs, but that they didn't emit X-Rays because they didn't accrete matter. But NGC4395 shows that they do (well, at least one does).

As far as efficiency goes - it's not very efficient (less efficient than many (most? all?) of the supermassive BHs), but more efficient than would be expected if "all" small galaxies had small BHs like this (otherwise you'd see a lot more emission from small galaxies).

Does that make sense? The important point is that they have detected emission from a small BH, which means that earlier *speculation* about small, non-emitting, BH in other small galaxies has to be re-thought.

More info is here

On your other points:

For a spherically symmetric distribution of matter, gravity is *not* "diluted" by an outer shell. If you are inside an isolated hollow shell, for example, there is no gravitation field from the shell (if you are near one side then the pull from the close stuff is equally balanced from the larger amount, but more distant, remainder of the shell to the other side of you).

And, if I remember correctly, Hawking radiation is a tiny effect. It is insignificant compared to the accretion rate for any BH that is visible - it's only important once the BH has accreted everything and is floating around in empty space by itself.

Well, since there is no evidence that women don't like tech fields due to a genetic difference (and you would probably have a hard time arguing that there is one since there is no real evolutionary advantage to it), then the cause must be social influence.

That is a very slippery slope you've built yourself there. It has been very well documented that in general men have much better spatial perception than women, while women have superior language ability.

This is just one of many studies from a quick Google search: from John's Hopkins.

Also, social trends != discrimination. If you don't want to work in an industry because there's a large proportion of "geeks", I'd suggest that you are the one who is prejudiced and discriminating.

--

• UniSci
  
• Space Telescope Science Institute
  
• MSNBC
  
• BBC
  
• CNN (buggy--text at bottom)
  
• Spaceflight Now
  
• Space.com
  
• USA Today (under weather... Bah!)
  
• Fox News
  
• Science Daily
  

• Story title: "Studies Say Video Games Increase Violent Behavior"
• Report title: "Violent Video Games Seen To Increase Violent Behavior"

Here's another article on the same topic.

RNA Harnessed As Molecular Computer Tests Well

From the same people (UniSci) that brought you Quantum Evolution.

Here's another article on the same topic.

RNA Harnessed As Molecular Computer Tests Well

From the same people (UniSci) that brought you Quantum Evolution.