Science makes the World go round.

thenewenlightenmentage: Neurons Could Outlive the Bodies That...

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:50:29 -0400

Neurons Could Outlive the Bodies That Contain Them

Most of your body is younger than you are. The cells on the topmost layer of your skin are around two weeks old, and soon to die. Your oldest red blood cells are around four months old. Your liver’s cells will live for around 10 to 17 months old before being replaced. All across your organs, cells are being produced and destroyed. They have an expiry date.

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the-absolute-best-posts: infinitylooper: Something to think...

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:43:12 -0400

the-absolute-best-posts:

infinitylooper:

Something to think about:

The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Let’s scale that to 46 years.
We have been here for 4 hours. Our industrial revolution began 1 minute ago.
In that time, we have destroyed more than 50% of the world’s forests.

This isn’t sustainable.

thescienceofreality: OSU’s third consecutive ‘Corpse flower’...

Wed, 15 May 2013 06:55:43 -0400

thescienceofreality:

OSU’s third consecutive ‘Corpse flower’ bloom in the past three years.

[Imaged above: A screenshot of OSU greenhouse visitors posing for the ever-popular O-H-I-O photo-op with Woody as the “I”. Below: A gif of Woody blooming through out the day.]

OSU’s biological sciences greenhouse has experienced it’s third consecutive corpse-flower bloom for the third year in a row. The rare and stinky corpse flower, also known as titan arum, belongs naturally in Sumatra, and can grow up to 10 feet tall, with a diameter 5-6 ft.

The largest recorded titan arum inflorescence:

Bonn (Germany), May 2003, 274 cm

Wageningen (The Netherlands), 1932, 267 cm

Bogor (Indonesia), 261 cm

Bonn (Germany), 2000, 257.5 cm

New York (USA), 1937, 256.5 cm

Frankfurt (Germany), 1985, 250 cm*

(* In contrast tot he other flowerings, the Frankfurt plant was measured from the tuber upward (2.7m). For comparison with other plants, therefore, about 20 cm have to be deducted.) Source: Bonn Botanical Garden.

The flower that opened up today at OSU for excited-viewers is named Woody. This will be Woody’s second blooming, after blooming two years ago, whilst another corpse flower at OSU, named Jesse, bloomed last year. Woody, itself, reaches over 70-inches tall, and has been growing a recorded 4-5 inches a day since first sprouting.

Although, in it’s natural habitat, the female and male corpse flowers will tend to bloom within days of each other, OSU’s corpse flowers must be hand-pollinated to obtain new seeds. Since the flower was discovered in the late 1800s, there have been less than around 175 blooms world-wide, 29 of which were within the U.S. as of 2010, making OSU’s 3-year blooming phenomenon a noteworthy occurrence in the world of plant-sciences.

astrodidact: Where would you rank Tesla amongst the greatest...

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:13:24 -0400

astrodidact:

Where would you rank Tesla amongst the greatest minds to ever live? I have him tied with Leonardo for second. I can’t bring myself to put either ahead of the other. What an amazing human being he was. He was generations ahead of his time.

Photo

Sun, 12 May 2013 18:18:59 -0400

the8thhday: oroblancos: bugwork: “It is common for koalas to...

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:42:48 -0400

the8thhday:

oroblancos:

bugwork:

“It is common for koalas to roam back to their home range afterwards and become confused to find nothing there. A worker noticed a koala had been sitting stationary in broad daylight on top of wood piles for over an hour.”

my heart just broke

TEARS UPON TEARS HAVE BEEN SHED..

Deforestation and why you should care

the8thhday: oroblancos: bugwork: “It is common for koalas to...

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:40:50 -0400

the8thhday:

oroblancos:

bugwork:

“It is common for koalas to roam back to their home range afterwards and become confused to find nothing there. A worker noticed a koala had been sitting stationary in broad daylight on top of wood piles for over an hour.”

my heart just broke

TEARS UPON TEARS HAVE BEEN SHED..

astrodidact: How many climate scientists agree that humans are...

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:37:18 -0400

astrodidact:

How many climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming? If you asked the average person on the street, the response might surprise you. On average, the general public think less than half of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. The reality is 97%. There is a huge gap between public perception of the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming and reality.

The consensus gap has real-world consequences. When people correctly understand that climate scientists agree on human-caused global warming, they are more likely to support policy to mitigate global warming. The consensus gap is directly linked to a lack of public support for climate action. This underscores the importance of clearly communicating the consensus and closing the consensus gap.

For over 20 years, opponents of climate action have understood this and attacked the consensus. In 1991, Western Fuels Association conducted a $510,000 campaign to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)”. To achieve this, they used a few dissenting scientists as spokesmen in order to construct the perception of ongoing scientific debate. More recently, an analysis of opinion editorials about climate change from 2006 to 2010 by conservative columnists observed that the most common climate myth was “there is no consensus.”

A concise summary of the strategy against the consensus is articulated in the infamous 2002 memo to Republicans by political strategist Frank Luntz:

“Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming in the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate…”

While fossil fuel companies and conservative columnists argue against consensus, what is the reality? The scientific consensus manifests in a multitude of ways, just as there are many lines of evidence for human-caused global warming.

Two recent studies have sought to measure the level of agreement in the scientific community in different ways and arrived at strikingly consistent results. A 2009 study led by Peter Doran surveyed over 3,000 Earth scientists and found that as the scientists’ expertise in climate change grew, so did the level of agreement about human-caused global warming. For the most qualified experts, climate scientists actively publishing peer-reviewed research, there was 97% agreement.

Alternatively, a 2010 analysis led by William Anderegg compiled a database of scientists from public declarations on climate change, both supporting and rejecting the consensus. Among scientists who had published peer-reviewed climate research, there was 97% agreement.

The consensus on climate change is reflected in the published statements of prestigious scientific organizations throughout the world. Academies of Science from many countries endorse the consensus view, as do many prestigious scientific organizations such as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Royal Society of the UK.

However, it is worth pointing out that science is not decided by majority vote. This is articulated concisely by John Reisman who says: “Science is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship. It is evidence that does the dictating.”

Scientists must back up their opinions with evidence-based analysis that survives the scrutiny of experts in the field. This means the peer-reviewed literature is a robust indicator of the state of the scientific consensus. Naomi Oreskes conducted the seminal study of peer-reviewed climate research in 2004, surveying the abstracts of papers from 1993 to 2003 matching the search “global climate change”. Oreskes found that out of the 928 papers, none rejected the consensus position that humans have caused most of global warming over the last 50 years.

The scientific consensus is robust, manifesting in the peer-reviewed literature, scientific organisations and surveys of climate scientists. Unfortunately (although luck had nothing to do with it), there is a huge gap between perception and reality. This consensus gap is part of the reason why there is a lack of public support for climate action.

This means closing the consensus gap is one of the low-lying fruit of climate communication. This doesn’t require explaining the intricacies of radiative physics—we just need to clearly communicate that climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. How do we achieve this? Ironically, I’ll leave you with another quote from Frank Luntz:

“There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.”

http://www.wunderground.com/earth-day/2013/closing-the-climate-change-consensus-gap

thescienceofreality: This Week in Science - May 6 - 12,...

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:29:38 -0400

thescienceofreality:

This Week in Science - May 6 - 12, 2013:

ESO & Oxford theories here.

Medical device inspiration here.

Pear-shaped nucleus here.

Meat-eating plant in Japan here.

Trophy molecule here.

Ancient DNA here.

Injectable eye robots here.

Antarctica deep-sea fish here.

Methane-based ecosystem here.

Troubling carbon dioxide levels here.

Metamaterial here.

Winged hybrid vehicle here.

jtotheizzoe: freshphotons: “These three images are snapshots...

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:28:41 -0400

jtotheizzoe:

freshphotons:

“These three images are snapshots of a spark-ignited expanding flame in different environments of the same hydrogen-air mixture. The top flame shows the ideal, reference case of a stable, smooth flame surface in a quiescent environment at atmospheric pressure. The middle flame is taken under elevated pressure simulating that within an internal combustion engine. The bottom flame is taken in a highly turbulent environment simulating another aspect of the engine interior. All images were taken at 8000 frames per second, using schlieren photography. The radius of the top flame is 11.4 millimeters.” C.K. Law, Swetaprovo Chaudhuri, and Fujia Wu (Princeton University).

Explosive beauty.

astrodidact: I love physics.

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:17:54 -0400

astrodidact:

I love physics.

jawdust: where is this guy’s blockbuster movie

Fri, 10 May 2013 21:12:31 -0400

jawdust:

where is this guy’s blockbuster movie

discoverynews: Navy Ship Shoots Down Drone With Laser...

Thu, 09 May 2013 20:22:26 -0400

discoverynews:

Navy Ship Shoots Down Drone With Laser Blaster

Star Wars fanatics who’ve longed for the days of fleets of laser-equipped vessels blasting enemies out of the sky and sea, your ship has quite literally come in.

Happy Victory in Europe Day!

Thu, 09 May 2013 08:56:46 -0400

peashooter85:

New York, Times Square, USA

London, Trafalgar Square, England

Paris, France

Toronto, Canada

Moscow, Soviet Union

Boston, USA

Melbourne, Australia

Philadelphia, USA

101st Airborne, Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s vacation home “The Eagles Nest”

I’ve been saying this for so god damn long

Tue, 07 May 2013 19:27:51 -0400

I’ve been saying this for so god damn long

jtotheizzoe: We never sit here under the weight of all this...

Mon, 06 May 2013 23:21:14 -0400

jtotheizzoe:

We never sit here under the weight of all this air, the 5 x 10^18 kg of atmosphere that sits above everyone on Earth, and say “Gosh, that sure is heavy!”

You don’t realize just how powerful that 1 bar (~100 kPa) of pressure is until a train car is filled with steam, allowed to cool, and then implodes ohmygod did that just happen?

For more implosion goodness, check out this awesome video from Veritasium.

Neuroscience: The woman who can't recognise her face

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:53:00 -0400

Neuroscience: The woman who can't recognise her face:

neurosciencestuff:

“I’ve been in a crowded elevator with mirrors all around, and a woman will move and I’ll go to get out the way and then realise: ‘oh that woman is me’.”

Heather Sellers has prosopagnosia, more commonly known as face blindness. “I can’t remember any image of the human face. It’s simply…

scinerds: Solid or Liquid? Physicists Redefine States of...

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:55:33 -0400

scinerds:

Solid or Liquid? Physicists Redefine States of Matter

Why can you stand on a glacier but not the ocean?

The answer seems simple enough: Liquids flow. Solids don’t. The atoms in liquids can slosh around. In solids, they fall lockstep into a crystal lattice. A crystal’s endlessly repeating pattern is so stable that it takes a considerable infusion of energy to make the atoms break rank. Or so physics textbooks say.

But this long-accepted explanation for the rigidity of solids fails to account for quasicrystals — bizarre solids first discovered in the lab in 1982 and found in nature in 2009. Atoms in quasicrystals are arranged in patterns that never repeat, but the material is nonetheless rigid. So is glass, an amorphous mass of stationary atoms that behaves like a solid but, upon closer inspection, looks more like a liquid frozen in time.

“Glasses have been around for thousands of years,” said Daniel Stein, a professor of physics and mathematics at New York University. “Chemists understand them. Engineers understand them. From the point of view of physics, we don’t understand them. Why are they rigid?”

Even crystalline solids such as glaciers resist categorization, as their atoms can flow, albeit very slowly. And sometimes the reverse also seems true: The ocean feels rigid if you jump onto it from a tall enough glacier. What, then, is the difference between a liquid and a solid?

Physicists in France and the United States are proposing new answers to this fundamental question. As outlined in a March article in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, the researchers have identified two characteristics of materials that dramatically change form at the intersections of temperature and pressure where liquids turn solid. These characteristics, the physicists say, could define the difference between the two states of matter.

Charles Radin, a mathematical physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, and his former student, David Aristoff, now a mathematician at the University of Minnesota, argue that the main difference between liquids and solids is the way they respond to shear, or twisting forces. Liquids barely resist shear and can easily be sloshed, whereas solids — regardless of whether they are crystals, quasicrystals or glass — resist attempts to change their shape.

The liquid-solid phase transition, Radin and Aristoff reason, should therefore be marked by the “shear response” of a material jumping from zero to a positive value. And they observed just such a jump for a two-dimensional model material, in which atoms are represented by disks: At low densities corresponding to the material’s liquid phase, it showed no response to shear, but when the disks were densely packed, like the atoms in a solid, shear caused the material to expand. “The crossover where it shows this effect is exactly the density where the system becomes crystalline,” Radin said. “We propose this as a different way of understanding what a solid is.”

Full Article

Danish scientists "months away" from finding HIV cure

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:09:31 -0400

Danish scientists "months away" from finding HIV cure:

gaywrites:

Scientists in Denmark are conducting clinical trials on a new strategy for combating HIV that they say could be the breakthrough needed to finally find a cure for the virus.

Lead researchers studying the treatment told Telegraph that initial signs are “promising.”

“I am almost certain that we will be successful in releasing the reservoirs of HIV,” said Dr. Ole Søgaard, a senior researcher at Denmark’s Aarhus University Hospital. “The challenge will be getting the patients’ immune system to recognize the virus and destroy it. This depends on the strength and sensitivity of individual immune systems.”

The Telegraph reports that 15 patients are currently enrolled in clinical trials for the treatment, and if they are successfully cured of HIV, the treatment will be rolled out on a larger scale, administered in combination with an immune-system booster.

SCIENCE. This is unreal.

"Participants rated their sexual orientation on a 10-point scale, ranging from gay to straight. Then..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 22:28:21 -0400

“

Participants rated their sexual orientation on a 10-point scale, ranging from gay to straight. Then they took a computer-administered test designed to measure their implicit sexual orientation. In the test, the participants were shown images and words indicative of hetero- and homosexuality (pictures of same-sex and straight couples, words like “homosexual” and “gay”) and were asked to sort them into the appropriate category, gay or straight, as quickly as possible. The computer measured their reaction times.

The twist was that before each word and image appeared, the word “me” or “other” was flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds — long enough for participants to subliminally process the word but short enough that they could not consciously see it. The theory here, known as semantic association, is that when “me” precedes words or images that reflect your sexual orientation (for example, heterosexual images for a straight person), you will sort these images into the correct category faster than when “me” precedes words or images that are incongruent with your sexual orientation (for example, homosexual images for a straight person). This technique, adapted from similar tests used to assess attitudes like subconscious racial bias, reliably distinguishes between self-identified straight individuals and those who self-identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual.

Using this methodology we identified a subgroup of participants who, despite self-identifying as highly straight, indicated some level of same-sex attraction (that is, they associated “me” with gay-related words and pictures faster than they associated “me” with straight-related words and pictures). Over 20 percent of self-described highly straight individuals showed this discrepancy.

Notably, these “discrepant” individuals were also significantly more likely than other participants to favor anti-gay policies; to be willing to assign significantly harsher punishments to perpetrators of petty crimes if they were presumed to be homosexual; and to express greater implicit hostility toward gay subjects (also measured with the help of subliminal priming). Thus our research suggests that some who oppose homosexuality do tacitly harbor same-sex attraction.

”

-
New study indicates homophobia is often a result of repressed homosexual feelings, validating what Freud posited in his concept of “reaction formation,” in which we lash out against others’ expressions of what we loathe in ourselves.

The above is via explore-blog, and it’s a long and fancy way of saying that (at least according to this study) homophobia is often associated with repressed homosexual feelings. This work will be appearing in the next issue of Journal of Stuff Everyone Knows But Couldn’t Quite Prove Until Now.

(via jtotheizzoe)

Science makes the World go round.

thenewenlightenmentage: Neurons Could Outlive the Bodies That...

Neurons Could Outlive the Bodies That Contain Them

the-absolute-best-posts: infinitylooper: Something to think...

The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Let’s scale that to 46 years. We have been here for 4 hours. Our industrial revolution began 1 minute ago. In that time, we have destroyed more than 50% of the world’s forests.

thescienceofreality: OSU’s third consecutive ‘Corpse flower’...

astrodidact: Where would you rank Tesla amongst the greatest...

Photo

the8thhday: oroblancos: bugwork: “It is common for koalas to...

the8thhday: oroblancos: bugwork: “It is common for koalas to...

astrodidact: How many climate scientists agree that humans are...

thescienceofreality: This Week in Science - May 6 - 12,...

jtotheizzoe: freshphotons: “These three images are snapshots...

astrodidact: I love physics.

jawdust: where is this guy’s blockbuster movie

discoverynews: Navy Ship Shoots Down Drone With Laser...

Navy Ship Shoots Down Drone With Laser Blaster

Happy Victory in Europe Day!

I’ve been saying this for so god damn long

jtotheizzoe: We never sit here under the weight of all this...

Neuroscience: The woman who can't recognise her face

scinerds: Solid or Liquid? Physicists Redefine States of...

Danish scientists "months away" from finding HIV cure

"Participants rated their sexual orientation on a 10-point scale, ranging from gay to straight. Then..."

The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Let’s scale that to 46 years.
We have been here for 4 hours. Our industrial revolution began 1 minute ago.
In that time, we have destroyed more than 50% of the world’s forests.