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Science's 125 Big Questions
Shadow Wrought writes "To celebrate their 125th anniversary Science is running a series of articles on the 125 Questions of Science. The top 25 each link to an article exploring the subject of the question in depth. Included are such questions as: Are we alone in the Universe? What are the limits of conventional computing? How did cooperative behavior evolve?"
Generally answers seem to cluster around the idea of kinship and the furthering of an individuals gene pool.Perhaps the answer will come in tandem with the solution to another evolutionary riddle pertaining to our kind, why is it we have such relatively small canines? The males of most primate species have large canines especially for fighting, usually other males in order to win controll of groups of females. Some speculation has it that monogamy in our kind did away with the need for large canines, or maybe, in our kind females did away with the male perrogative of controlling breeding?
!Happy Birthday Canada!
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
birds eating out of crocodiles mouths is not strickly speaking "evolved" but more of a learned behavior....if you stuck a bunch of birds who knew how to do this with a bunch of crocs who didn't you would have a bunch of dead birds. and a bunch of confused but stuffed crocs....but these are all examples of higher life forms (of course higher is a misnomer) if you are talking about evolved you have to find behavior that is actually genetic.
wait a minute what the hell are both of you talking about...this is cooperative behavior not sybiosis...an example would be wolves hunting together or cells growing into a tree and shit...ie the same species helping it self out...of course this is even more obviouse. i die but all my relations survive and dominate becouse of my sacrifice...and my genes that contain that sacrifice gene is in all my relitives who survive and dominate but my neigbors who don't have those genes survive less and die off...only thing left are my genes in my relatives.
what a stupid question.
stendec@gmail.com
That for throwing it from a building. For it falling off the table, it has enough time for rotating 180 degrees. That simple.
Here's something else interesting:
Tumbling toast, Murphy's Law and the Fundamental Constants
European Journal of Physics 16 172-176 1995
There's a widespread suspicion among the public that toast sliding off a plate or table has a natural tendency to land butter side down, thus providing prima facie evidence for Murphy's Law: "If something can go wrong, it will". Most scientists, in contrast, dismiss such belief as ludicrous. Indeed, an investigation by the BBC-TV science programme Q.E.D. in 1993 claimed to have proved definitively that the whole notion was nothing but an urban myth. However, as I show in the paper, the experiments carried out by the programme were dynamically inappropriate (in that they consisted of people simply tossing buttered bread into the air - hardly common practice around the breakfast table). When the problem of toast sliding off a plate or table is examined more carefully - with the toast modelled as a thin, rigid, rough lamina - it turns out that the public perception is quite correct. Toast does indeed have a natural tendency to land butter side down, essentially because the gravitation torque induced as the toast topples over the edge of the plate/table is insufficient to bring the toast butter-side up again by the time it hits the floor. Note that this has nothing to do with some aerodynamic effect caused by one side being buttered - it is just gravity, plus a bit of friction.However, I go on to show that the tumbling toast phenomenon has far deeper roots than one might expect. If tables were a lot higher - around 3 metres high - the problem of toast landing butter-side down would go away, as the toast would have enough time to complete a full rotation. So why are tables the height they are ? Simple: to be convenient for humans. So why are humans the height they are ? Using a simple chemical bonding model of the human frame, I show that there is a limit to the safe height for bipedal, essentially cylindrical creatures like humans. The limit is around 3 metres - above that height, a simple fall results in gravity accelerating the skull to such a high kinetic energy that the chemical bonds in the skull are ruptured, causing severe fracturing. This limit, in turn, sets a maximum height on tables suitable for creatures with human articulation of about 1.5 metres - which is still not high enough to prevent toast landing butter-side down. It thus seems that human-like organisms are doomed to experience this manifestation of Murphy's Law.
But then comes the real cosmic twist in the tale. The formula giving the maximum height of humans turns out to contain three so-called "fundamental constants of the universe". The first - the electromagnetic fine-structure constant - determines the strength of the chemical bonds in the skull, while the second - the gravitational fine-structure constant - determines the strength of gravity. Finally, the so-called Bohr radius dictates the size of atoms making up the body. The precise values of these three fundamental constants were built into the very design of the universe just moments after the Big Bang. In other words, toast falling off the breakfast table lands butter-side down because the universe is made that way.
Having made this depressing discovery about the nature of our universe, I felt duty-bound to come up with some ways around it. After all, we should not be fatalistic about such things. There are any number of daft ways (eating from 3 metre high tables, eating tiny squares of toast, putting the butter on the underside, tying the toast to a cat, which of course knows how to get right-side up during a fall, etc. etc). The physicist's approach is to minimise the amount of time the toast is exposed to the turning effect of gravity. This means doing the opposite of what you might expect. If your toast is sliding off the table, you should give it a swipe with your hand, to increase its ho
The article on why humans have so few genes [sciencemag.org] does some nice hand-waving but fails to answer the core question. Sure, the genome can do some interesting combinatoric stuff to get more out of a given length of DNA, but that does not answer the question -- why should humans have fewer genes than something so simple as a mustard plant or rice?
Actually, it's mostly that evolution has created DNA sequences, mitochondrial DNA, and various fragments and editing/copying mechanisms that allows it to get a lot done with less than you think, by silencing segments, reusing segments, having offsets for copying, and allowing proteins to shift and rotate.
The world is way more complex than the old days of DNA makes proteins and each segment makes one and only one - everything interacts, mutations occur, copying errors happen, and it's all really kind of beautiful on the proteomics level.
So that isn't really a question anymore - we have enough genes to get the job done, because they have more capabilities than anyone imagined ten years ago.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What are the limits of conventional computing?
Well right now the limits of chess computing seems to be this Hydra cluster
Is it time to retire the "Beowulf" cliché?
> More than half of the top 25 were biology questions. You'd think physics would be a little more strongly represented.
If you're interested in the physics questions you can cut out the journalistic middle-men and read John Baez's Open Questions in Physics. I found it informative, entertaining, and for the most part comprehensible to a moderately well informed non-physicist.
Wikipedia has a List of unsolved problems broken down by field, but the field lists I read didn't strike me as particularly well done. YMMV.
> But I'm all for answering the evolution questions if it'll stop my in-laws from giving me creationist literature.
Facts, answers, and explanations aren't going to make creationists blink an eye.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Glass is transparent because the majority of its atoms are aligned so the photons of light are not reflected, absorbed or scattered.
The simplest solution is usually the best.
That's NOT Occam's razor. The way it's usually stated is a fantastically bad translation. Occam's razor is really:
Don't make unneccesary assumptions.
They seem similar at first glance, but the more common translation makes no distinction between assumptions and known/observable facts. That distinction is at the core of the razor's meaning. The loss of that distinction can in some cases lead the real razor and its bad translation to opposite conclusions.
Take, for example, the question "How does electricity work?" The two most common proposed answers (and I would argue, the two categories under which all possible answers can be collected) are "Particle physics" and "God did it." Now, particle physics is very complicated. It takes years of study to understand, and one of the main points of the article under discussion is that there's still a lot we don't yet understand about it. "God did it" is a much simpler explanation. The bad translator's razor explicitly favors God. But particle physics is complicated because it is an enormous mess of known, observed, incontrovertible facts. Where facts are not known, physics actively avoids making any assumptions at all Theology's entire point (the overwhelming majority of respected theologians agree with me on this) is that it rests on faith--making assumptions about formally undecidable propositions like the existence of God. So the true Occam's razor favors particle physics, quite the opposite of the bad translation's conclusion.
In regards to your specific use of the razor, the bad translation has again led you to the wrong conclusion. The assumption that we are alone is a much simpler solution than the assumption that we are not, but it is not necessary, now or ever, to assume either. Until we find alien life or a compelling reason to believe there is none, simply keep your mind open about it.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
(In fact, glass is a fluid much like water - only a LOT more viscous.)
a ss_being_liquid_at_room_temperature
I've often heard this, and the windows of several-hundred-year-old buildings are often cited as an example of this (a high school physics teacher told this story to the class), with the bottom part of the glass pane being thicker than the top, but I recall hearing an alternative explanation of this. Also, many precisely made pieces of glass, such as binocular lenses and telescope lenses and mirrors, do NOT flow measurably over decades or centuries at normal temperatures.
Googling glass flow bring several relevant links such as this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#The_myth_of_gl
Okay, perhaps glass does flow, but if so the rate of flow is many orders of magnitude slower than would be indicated by the thicknesses of the old glass windows.
Tag lost or not installed.
Here's a snippet from a better explanation than I was going to write:
"A transparent material is one in which the charged particles can't permanently absorb any photons of visible light. While these charged particles all try to absorb the visible light photons, they find that there are no permanent quantum states available to them when they do. Instead, they play with the photons briefly and then let them continue on their way."
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
How nice that you have worked it all out for yourself, but, frankly, that's all pseudo-scientific bullshit. Photon's don't "experience" things, and people don't "observe the universe from the outside".