Your calculations are off by a factor of 60. The conversion should be 186,000 miles/sec * 60 sec/min * 60 min/hr * 24 hr/day * 365 days/yr * 20.5 = 1.20 x 10^14 miles, or 120 trillion miles.
For comparison, if Voyager 1 were headed towards that star system (it is not) at its present velocity of about 38,000 mph relative to the sun (and disregarding the proper motion of the star system), it would take over 350,000 years to get there.
If someone does that study, and finds the expected 100% correlation between life and death, the report of that study on/. will undoubtedly be greeted with "Correlation != causation" posts.
I'm not certain the submitter understood the article submitted. If you look at the Entertrainment Weekly link, there's no jeremiad about the lack of science works in its own list. The complaint about the list comes in a blog post about said list, and did not come from EW.
I usually have scant praise for Entertainment Weekly, a magazine which tends to make People look like The Atlantic Monthly, but I have to say that other than the lack of science nonfiction, I was fairly satisfied with their list. Lots of Booker and Pulitzer winners and shortlisters on the the EW list, but not really anything so pretentious that it was clearly added to look impressive. There's a nice (though strange) mix of different genres, though I think a separate list for nonfiction, underrepresented overall, was warranted.
There are the usual issues with making a numbered "best of" list, particularly one with such diversity (Is Bridget Jones's Diary a better read than Neuromancer? Depends on who you ask.), and there seems to be an invisible rule to limit to one entry per author. As with any such list, yes, there are changes I'd have made if I made the list (did they fear cancelled subscriptions if they didn't pander to Oprah's Book Club?), but overall, considering the source, I can't complain too much. As far as adding science: Simon Singh's The Code Book, Matt Ridley's Genome, and Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's American Prometheus spring to mind.
Well, of course it was nailed there! If God hadn't nailed that bird down, it would have nuzzled up to its chromosomes, bent 'em apart with its beak, and
VOOM! Feeweeweewee!
And parrots would have then evolved to become the dominant species on earth.
Is this a requirement for Americans to have an interest in a Science subject, ripping bodies apart and blowing up the Earth?
Maybe I should feel ashamed for fitting your stereotype so well, but I must admit that aspect of science has always fascinated me (and yes, I am American). With physics and astronomy, I suppose I can argue that it gives me a sense of the scale of the forces involved, but really, it's the same thing in more terrestrial scale sciences- I'm a biochemist IRL, and frankly, toxicology and pathology are really interesting to me as well. I just find it amazing that things like magnetars and black holes and bone-dissolving acids and filoviruses exist in nature.
I'll agree that sometimes the popular science coverage of many topics tends to be sensationalist, assuming the audience will only be interested in astrophysics or microbiology if their potential to cause human catastrophe is described in lurid detail. There may well be something psychologically profound in fascination many Americans have at the prospect of their own annihilation.
The original question posed, however, was "Can anyone tell me what the effects of ultra-strong magnetic fields would be on a living creature?" I found the question intriguing, did some research, and reported back my findings: gruesome death. Now, if a magnetar were to collide with the earth....
Yeah, I was trying to specifically refer to devices like these that deliver high fields that last a matter of microseconds, but you and Maxwell are of course correct about the oscillating field associated with EM radiation.
The 16 Tesla field used to levitate that frog is towards the upper end of the field strength that can be safely tolerated for any duration by most organisms. A static magnetic field of 20T or more can interfere with enzymatic processes, and above 25T can interfere with nerve conduction. Pulsed magnetic fields can be considerably more dangerous at a given field strength, because they can induce eddy currents in the body which can cause cardiac arrhythmias, but you're still looking at around the 10T range unless your heart is particularly vulnerable.
In contrast, the 10^11T field of a magnetar would tear you to pieces even several thousand km away, and then tear those pieces into smaller, grotesquely elongated pieces, as the field strength is enough to distort the geometries of atomic orbitals. What would of course actually kill you on your way to a magnetar are the X-rays and gamma rays the thing throws out, and these forms of radiation should be considered among the effects of a cosmically strong magnetic field. However, assuming you could survive those, the magnetic field itself would still instantly kill you. A particular problem is that your body is made up of many different kinds of atoms and molecules, which will be affected by the intense field differently depending on whether they are ions, have a dipole moment, etc., so that you will in a literal sense be disintegrated.
Condition______________________Forecast
Stone is Wet___________________Liquid Water on Mars!
Stone is Dry___________________Mars Still a Frozen Desert
Shadow on Ground_______________Sunny
White on Top___________________Well, We Did Land At The North Pole
Can't See Stone________________Dusty, or Phoenix Broken
Swing Stone____________________Windy
Stone Jumping Up and Down______Marsquake
Stone Gone_____________________Aliens
The submitter is still waiting for the cat to frighten the pigeon into laying the egg that will roll down the chute to land on the lever that opens the cage so the trained monkey can run over and press the letter "D" on the keyboard.
Why not just submit your code using Gmail Custom Time? Then you won't have to worry about deadlines at all- you can even apply to last year's Summer of Code if you want to!
In terms of more lasting recognition for Arthur C. Clarke, he already has asteroid 4923 Clarke, a dinosaur, Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei, Clarke orbits (an IAU recognized term for geostationary orbit), , a bunch of space stuff has already been named for his Odyssey works, and if we ever build a space elevator, it's likely his name will be connected in some way with that. The man has already been much honored, and deservedly so.
Both "asymmetric" and "unsymmetric" are in accepted use, though "a" is a lot more common than "un," particularly in math and physics (so yes, "asymmetric" would probably be more common to describe a spacecraft trajectory).
Chemists use "un" to describe non-symmetric molecules pretty often- consider the rocket fuel UDMH: unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, though chemical reactions lacking symmetry are more often called "asymmetric," like the Sharpless asymmetric epoxidation. Asymmetric reactions can sometimes produce unsymmetrical products. Yes, it is unpossibly confusing. Just make sure to not confuse either "asymmetric" or "unsymmetric" with "antisymmetric."
Taking the density of diamond to be 3.5 grams per cubic centimeter, and these diamonds to each have a volume of about 1 cubic nanometer, the average interstellar nanodiamond has a carat weight of 1.75*10^-20 carats (One carat is 200 milligrams). The interstellar molecular clouds where we would expect to find these diamonds have a density of about 2 x 10^-22 grams per cubic centimeter; one cubic centimeter is about 3.4*10^-56 cubic parsecs, so there are about 5.9*10^33 grams of matter in a cubic parsec.
Using the figure from the article, we could then expect there to be as many as 5.9*10^49 diamonds in a cubic parsec, with a total mass of 2×10^26 kilograms, and a total carat weight around 10^30 carats in a cubic parsec. Alas, not exactly gem quality material.
Some notes:
A well-formed 1 cubic nanometer diamond crystal would have about 175 carbon atoms total.
Our solar system has a total mass of about 2*10^30 kg, 99.8% of which is the sun.
The mass of the earth is about 6*10^24 kilograms.
If split among the population of earth, your share of the diamonds in a cubic parsec molecular cloud comes to about 30 trillion tons.
If you merged all the nanoscale diamonds in a cubic parsec molecular cloud into a single diamond, it would have a volume of 5.7*10^13 cubic km, about 50 times that of the earth.
Arthur C. Clarke noted that the idea that Jupiter's core was a gigantic diamond was inspired by an article in Nature which speculated that a solid layer observed in the compositions of Uranus and Neptune was composed of carbon liberated by intense pressure from methane.
Laboratory experiments mimicking the temperatures and pressures found deep within those planets suggest diamond production is indeed possible, but would be more likely to be an agglomerate mass of diamond microcrystals than the yottacarat diamond solitaire envisioned by Clarke. Uranus and Neptune would probably make for better diamond production than Jupiter and Saturn due to a higher abundance of methane and thus carbon.
That being said, recent research suggests that Uranus and Neptune are not sufficiently carbon-rich to have produced an appreciable amount of diamond after all.
The parent poses an important question, and as it turns out, Mycoplasma genitalium was a clever choice in that regard: its genome is so streamlined as to lack the machinery to methylate its DNA. In prokaryotes like M. genitalium, methylation is mostly used to distinguish self from non-self DNA, quite useful (restriction enzymes can be used to carve up non-self DNA then), but not strictly necessary; in eukaryotes, it plays a vital role in regulation of gene transcription, so appropriate methylation is very important.
In our analysis, restriction enzyme digestions of M.
genitalium genomic DNA, using MspI and HpaII, did not
support the fact that CpG methylation currently exists in this
genome as evidenced by the identical pattern produced by both
restriction enzymes (data not shown). Whether the disparity in
CpG dinucleotides in the M. genitalium genome is the result of
a now extinct CpG methylase activity or related instead to the
codon usage of this organism will require further analysis.
The level of organization being discussed in the paper treats a subdivision of the eukaryotes into "superkingdoms." (There's actually not a completely agreed upon term for this level.) This would put these groups a level below the three domains (Eucarya, Eubacteria, Archaebacteria) proposed by Carl Woese. There's a high-level differentiation between the superkingdoms involved based on organization of flagella, with a high-level split between unikonts (one flagellum) and bikonts (two, naturally). This is of course based on evolutionary ancestry- humans are unikonts, but don't have many cells with flagella.
The unikonts contain the amoebae lineages in one grouping, and the animal and fungi together in another. The bikonts contain the plants and algaes in one grouping, and also a handful of other groupings which take care of the rest of the eukaryotes, most of which are unicellular organisms of various sort. It is the "various sort" that's being ironed out with this paper- the authors argue that on the basis of a common genetic heritage, a couple of the leftover groupings can be consolidated.
Ironically, this move would actually reunite groupings that were fairly recently separated by the argument that no firm evidence of relation existed. Back when the "five Kingdoms" (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Monera, Protista) were considered the top level of organization, Protista existed as a sort of "junk drawer" for simple organisms which did not clearly fit in the other categories. Now it looks as though some of these organisms really are related.
Indeed, Yahoo! Games has its own Scrabble clone (with minor rules differences, I believe), but they had the savvy to call it "Literati" to prevent the "reasonable likelihood of confusion" trademark infringement argument.
The sugar price supports paradoxically play a big role in hurting Hawaii's sugar industry. The price floor means that the minimum price for sugar from Florida, Louisiana, and Texas is the same as that for Hawaii, so producers in those states make just as much money for their sugar, but have much lower costs for labor and transportation. The supports are also a significant incentive to producers in those other states to produce as much as they can, which negates Hawaii's dramatic per-acre productivity advantage.
I totally agree- it doesn't seem to make much sense. It's the system of price supports, tariffs, and quotas that makes this work for the sugar industry. Basically, they've found a smaller market that they've nearly cornered to be more profitable than a much larger market that they'd have to compete on price for. When a foreign producer would like to sell its sugar in the United States, it may do so up to a specified quota, beyond which it is subject to a massive tariff, making further import uneconomical. Prices are further supported by a loan program, where producers receive a low interest loan for the set floor price value of the sugar collateral. If the market price for sugar drops below the price floor, the producer can forfeit the sugar to the US Dept. of Agriculture, who will keep that sugar off the market, propping prices back up.
Now, of course, American sugar producers would love to be able to sell even more of their price-supported product. Certainly, they'd love to return to the pre-HFCS days of supplying American beverage manufacturers with their sweetener. Here's how the scenarios shake out for them though:
The current system of price supports means that American sugar cannot compete economically with corn syrup; this is why Coke, Pepsi, and nearly everyone else switched to HFCS decades ago.
If American sugar traded at something closer to fair market prices with fewer or no import quotas , there would be a major shakeup in the US industry; a wave of cheap Caribbean sugar will hit US shores and put many producers out of business. As the parent notes, however, cheap sugar will increase demand for sugar overall, including perhaps a return to some old markets now held by King Corn, so a well-positioned US producer could well thrive in an open market. But why fight for market position when the status quo gives it to you for free?
What the sugar industry can only dream of, though, is if American sugar were legally mandated as the American sweetener, while keeping the price supports. Then the industry could have its cake, eat it too, and wash it down with a three dollar American sugar-sweetened Coke. However, this is politically impossible, even for the sugar lobby, as it would naturally induce fury in beverage conglomerates and corn agribusiness, neither of which are exactly slouches when it comes to influence.
This scenario also shows that the sugar industry has been astute in picking its battleground- it's hard to garner political sympathy for an industry competing against another industry in the same country. American Sugar vs. American Corn is a tough sell for sugar, since Midwestern legislators will fight to the death to protect corn interests, but American Sugar vs. Foreign Sugar is the sort of thing Congress can rally around.
Actually, a major reason why high fructose corn syrup is the sweetener of choice for many American food products is that the U.S. sugar lobby is so strong. Protectionist trade agreements and price floors ensure that Americans pay about double the average world price for sugar, so it's far less expensive to use HFCS than cane sugar.
I could not, would not, on a boat.
I will not, will not, with a goat.
I will not eat them in the rain.
I will not eat them on a train.
Not in the dark! Not in a tree!
Not in a car! You let me be!
I do not like them in a box.
I do not like them with a fox.
I will not eat them in a house.
I do not like them with a mouse.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them ANYWHERE!
When "glow green" genes are spliced into an organism, that's usually a gene for the expression of "Green Fluorescent Protein," a protein native to Aequorea jellyfish. Green Fluorescent Protein, as the name implies, is "fluorescent," not bioluminescent or phosphorescent. The excitation and subsequent emission of fluorescence occurs on a very fast timescale (as opposed to phosphorescence, where you can "charge" a material with light, then take it to a dark place, where it will emit light gradually). Therefore, you need to shine a light on fluorescence materials to make them glow- shining a light in the blue or near UV (black light) wavelengths on one of these pigs will cause them to absorb that light, and in turn emit light which is green in color.
Meteor showers are generally the result of the earth passing through a stream of small debris particles. Streams of notable size (large enough that you would reasonably call such an encounter a "shower") almost always are from fragments which break free from comets as they pass near the sun. Just as the comets are periodic, the positions of the debris trails are periodic- most meteor showers can now not only be anticipated in terms of time and optimal location, but in approximate meteor frequency as well.
Slashdot Mirror
There was also a city bus which was clearly a CTA- Chicago Transit Authority- but the C had been subtly altered to make it a "GTA."
For comparison, if Voyager 1 were headed towards that star system (it is not) at its present velocity of about 38,000 mph relative to the sun (and disregarding the proper motion of the star system), it would take over 350,000 years to get there.
If someone does that study, and finds the expected 100% correlation between life and death, the report of that study on /. will undoubtedly be greeted with "Correlation != causation" posts.
I usually have scant praise for Entertainment Weekly, a magazine which tends to make People look like The Atlantic Monthly, but I have to say that other than the lack of science nonfiction, I was fairly satisfied with their list. Lots of Booker and Pulitzer winners and shortlisters on the the EW list, but not really anything so pretentious that it was clearly added to look impressive. There's a nice (though strange) mix of different genres, though I think a separate list for nonfiction, underrepresented overall, was warranted.
There are the usual issues with making a numbered "best of" list, particularly one with such diversity (Is Bridget Jones's Diary a better read than Neuromancer? Depends on who you ask.), and there seems to be an invisible rule to limit to one entry per author. As with any such list, yes, there are changes I'd have made if I made the list (did they fear cancelled subscriptions if they didn't pander to Oprah's Book Club?), but overall, considering the source, I can't complain too much. As far as adding science: Simon Singh's The Code Book, Matt Ridley's Genome, and Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's American Prometheus spring to mind.
And parrots would have then evolved to become the dominant species on earth.
Maybe I should feel ashamed for fitting your stereotype so well, but I must admit that aspect of science has always fascinated me (and yes, I am American). With physics and astronomy, I suppose I can argue that it gives me a sense of the scale of the forces involved, but really, it's the same thing in more terrestrial scale sciences- I'm a biochemist IRL, and frankly, toxicology and pathology are really interesting to me as well. I just find it amazing that things like magnetars and black holes and bone-dissolving acids and filoviruses exist in nature.
I'll agree that sometimes the popular science coverage of many topics tends to be sensationalist, assuming the audience will only be interested in astrophysics or microbiology if their potential to cause human catastrophe is described in lurid detail. There may well be something psychologically profound in fascination many Americans have at the prospect of their own annihilation.
The original question posed, however, was "Can anyone tell me what the effects of ultra-strong magnetic fields would be on a living creature?" I found the question intriguing, did some research, and reported back my findings: gruesome death. Now, if a magnetar were to collide with the earth....
Yeah, I was trying to specifically refer to devices like these that deliver high fields that last a matter of microseconds, but you and Maxwell are of course correct about the oscillating field associated with EM radiation.
In contrast, the 10^11T field of a magnetar would tear you to pieces even several thousand km away, and then tear those pieces into smaller, grotesquely elongated pieces, as the field strength is enough to distort the geometries of atomic orbitals. What would of course actually kill you on your way to a magnetar are the X-rays and gamma rays the thing throws out, and these forms of radiation should be considered among the effects of a cosmically strong magnetic field. However, assuming you could survive those, the magnetic field itself would still instantly kill you. A particular problem is that your body is made up of many different kinds of atoms and molecules, which will be affected by the intense field differently depending on whether they are ions, have a dipole moment, etc., so that you will in a literal sense be disintegrated.
Condition______________________Forecast
Stone is Wet___________________Liquid Water on Mars!
Stone is Dry___________________Mars Still a Frozen Desert
Shadow on Ground_______________Sunny
White on Top___________________Well, We Did Land At The North Pole
Can't See Stone________________Dusty, or Phoenix Broken
Swing Stone____________________Windy
Stone Jumping Up and Down______Marsquake
Stone Gone_____________________Aliens
The submitter is still waiting for the cat to frighten the pigeon into laying the egg that will roll down the chute to land on the lever that opens the cage so the trained monkey can run over and press the letter "D" on the keyboard.
Why not just submit your code using Gmail Custom Time? Then you won't have to worry about deadlines at all- you can even apply to last year's Summer of Code if you want to!
In terms of more lasting recognition for Arthur C. Clarke, he already has asteroid 4923 Clarke, a dinosaur, Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei, Clarke orbits (an IAU recognized term for geostationary orbit), , a bunch of space stuff has already been named for his Odyssey works, and if we ever build a space elevator, it's likely his name will be connected in some way with that. The man has already been much honored, and deservedly so.
Chemists use "un" to describe non-symmetric molecules pretty often- consider the rocket fuel UDMH: unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, though chemical reactions lacking symmetry are more often called "asymmetric," like the Sharpless asymmetric epoxidation. Asymmetric reactions can sometimes produce unsymmetrical products. Yes, it is unpossibly confusing. Just make sure to not confuse either "asymmetric" or "unsymmetric" with "antisymmetric."
Using the figure from the article, we could then expect there to be as many as 5.9*10^49 diamonds in a cubic parsec, with a total mass of 2×10^26 kilograms, and a total carat weight around 10^30 carats in a cubic parsec. Alas, not exactly gem quality material.
Some notes:
A well-formed 1 cubic nanometer diamond crystal would have about 175 carbon atoms total.
Our solar system has a total mass of about 2*10^30 kg, 99.8% of which is the sun.
The mass of the earth is about 6*10^24 kilograms.
If split among the population of earth, your share of the diamonds in a cubic parsec molecular cloud comes to about 30 trillion tons.
If you merged all the nanoscale diamonds in a cubic parsec molecular cloud into a single diamond, it would have a volume of 5.7*10^13 cubic km, about 50 times that of the earth.
Laboratory experiments mimicking the temperatures and pressures found deep within those planets suggest diamond production is indeed possible, but would be more likely to be an agglomerate mass of diamond microcrystals than the yottacarat diamond solitaire envisioned by Clarke. Uranus and Neptune would probably make for better diamond production than Jupiter and Saturn due to a higher abundance of methane and thus carbon.
That being said, recent research suggests that Uranus and Neptune are not sufficiently carbon-rich to have produced an appreciable amount of diamond after all.
Analyses of M. genitalium suggest it may have orginally had methylation capabilities, but has lost them over time: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=206970&blobtype=pdf
The unikonts contain the amoebae lineages in one grouping, and the animal and fungi together in another. The bikonts contain the plants and algaes in one grouping, and also a handful of other groupings which take care of the rest of the eukaryotes, most of which are unicellular organisms of various sort. It is the "various sort" that's being ironed out with this paper- the authors argue that on the basis of a common genetic heritage, a couple of the leftover groupings can be consolidated.
Ironically, this move would actually reunite groupings that were fairly recently separated by the argument that no firm evidence of relation existed. Back when the "five Kingdoms" (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Monera, Protista) were considered the top level of organization, Protista existed as a sort of "junk drawer" for simple organisms which did not clearly fit in the other categories. Now it looks as though some of these organisms really are related.
My amygdala! The gas mask does nothing!
Indeed, Yahoo! Games has its own Scrabble clone (with minor rules differences, I believe), but they had the savvy to call it "Literati" to prevent the "reasonable likelihood of confusion" trademark infringement argument.
The sugar price supports paradoxically play a big role in hurting Hawaii's sugar industry. The price floor means that the minimum price for sugar from Florida, Louisiana, and Texas is the same as that for Hawaii, so producers in those states make just as much money for their sugar, but have much lower costs for labor and transportation. The supports are also a significant incentive to producers in those other states to produce as much as they can, which negates Hawaii's dramatic per-acre productivity advantage.
Now, of course, American sugar producers would love to be able to sell even more of their price-supported product. Certainly, they'd love to return to the pre-HFCS days of supplying American beverage manufacturers with their sweetener. Here's how the scenarios shake out for them though:
The current system of price supports means that American sugar cannot compete economically with corn syrup; this is why Coke, Pepsi, and nearly everyone else switched to HFCS decades ago.
If American sugar traded at something closer to fair market prices with fewer or no import quotas , there would be a major shakeup in the US industry; a wave of cheap Caribbean sugar will hit US shores and put many producers out of business. As the parent notes, however, cheap sugar will increase demand for sugar overall, including perhaps a return to some old markets now held by King Corn, so a well-positioned US producer could well thrive in an open market. But why fight for market position when the status quo gives it to you for free?
What the sugar industry can only dream of, though, is if American sugar were legally mandated as the American sweetener, while keeping the price supports. Then the industry could have its cake, eat it too, and wash it down with a three dollar American sugar-sweetened Coke. However, this is politically impossible, even for the sugar lobby, as it would naturally induce fury in beverage conglomerates and corn agribusiness, neither of which are exactly slouches when it comes to influence.
This scenario also shows that the sugar industry has been astute in picking its battleground- it's hard to garner political sympathy for an industry competing against another industry in the same country. American Sugar vs. American Corn is a tough sell for sugar, since Midwestern legislators will fight to the death to protect corn interests, but American Sugar vs. Foreign Sugar is the sort of thing Congress can rally around.
Actually, a major reason why high fructose corn syrup is the sweetener of choice for many American food products is that the U.S. sugar lobby is so strong. Protectionist trade agreements and price floors ensure that Americans pay about double the average world price for sugar, so it's far less expensive to use HFCS than cane sugar.
I could not, would not, on a boat.
I will not, will not, with a goat.
I will not eat them in the rain.
I will not eat them on a train.
Not in the dark! Not in a tree!
Not in a car! You let me be!
I do not like them in a box.
I do not like them with a fox.
I will not eat them in a house.
I do not like them with a mouse.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them ANYWHERE!
When "glow green" genes are spliced into an organism, that's usually a gene for the expression of "Green Fluorescent Protein," a protein native to Aequorea jellyfish. Green Fluorescent Protein, as the name implies, is "fluorescent," not bioluminescent or phosphorescent. The excitation and subsequent emission of fluorescence occurs on a very fast timescale (as opposed to phosphorescence, where you can "charge" a material with light, then take it to a dark place, where it will emit light gradually). Therefore, you need to shine a light on fluorescence materials to make them glow- shining a light in the blue or near UV (black light) wavelengths on one of these pigs will cause them to absorb that light, and in turn emit light which is green in color.
Meteor showers are generally the result of the earth passing through a stream of small debris particles. Streams of notable size (large enough that you would reasonably call such an encounter a "shower") almost always are from fragments which break free from comets as they pass near the sun. Just as the comets are periodic, the positions of the debris trails are periodic- most meteor showers can now not only be anticipated in terms of time and optimal location, but in approximate meteor frequency as well.