What does it take to be dominant in the world of sports? Well, the short answer seems to be money and steroids, but of course other factors exist (HGH, being scheduled against the Knicks, etc). But you just try telling that to those teams of researchers who occasionally pop up attempting to correlate wins and losses with uniform color.
One such study was conducted during the 2004 Olympics, with a focus on the judo competition, essentially concluding that athletes wearing blue robes had a sporting advantage over their counterparts decked out in white. Blue, the logic goes, is bolder and meaner looking than white, thus somehow psyching out all the lily-clad pansy boys. Blue, apparently, is the new red.
Remember how when you were little and it rained, your parents told you God is crying because you did something wrong? Turns out it's actually just a whole host of bacteria coalescing into ice and plummeting back to Earth. Because you did something wrong.
Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, with colleagues in Montana and France, reported today in Science that most ice nucleators, particles ice forms around, found in snow at mid- and high-latitude locations were biological in origin. I.e., it's just just the yellow snow you need to worry about. It's pretty much all filled with creepy crawlies (or, more appropriately, fearsome flagellum).
Their guess, then, is that the bacteria affects the rain cycle or actually causes their own precipitation.
According to the Meteoritical Society, more than 30,000 meteorities have been identified. (Meteorites are the interstellar rocks that make it through our atmosphere and land on Earth.) Most of them come from the rocky debris (like asteroids and comets) floating through space, but a few dozen are believed to have originated on Mars or the moon.
Or Mercury? (What, can anomalous meteorites only come from places the begin with the letter “M”?)
In a new paper submitted to the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, two Canadian astronomers crunch the numbers and find that we should expect Mercury-borne meteorites to strike the Earth at roughly half the rate of those from Mars. In other words, there might already be a few pieces of Mercury here on Earth.
Astrophysicist John Dubinski has been running simulations on his supercomputer of galaxies forming, colliding into each other, and otherwise moving around as they are wont to do. Last year he compiled nine animations onto a DVD, wrapped them up with "the soundworlds of renaissance and baroque counterpoint, free improvisation, Middle-Eastern music, minimalism, techno and electronica to create a musical feast that crosses time and dimension," and sold Gravitas.
As of this week, he's begun giving the DVD away for free via torrent, but he's posted the series of animations on YouTube, making my day far, far happier than otherwise possible.
The last couple weeks have been filled with news on Microsoft. Microsoft attempts to acquire Yahoo! Microsoft invests $3 million in the development of healthcare applications. Microsoft gives away high-end software development tools to college students. Microsoft takes sides in the high-def DVD format war. Microsoft may partner with Netflix.
Microsoft was famously late to the Internet business, and has always lagged behind one online giant or another, whether it be Google, AOL, Yahoo!, take your pick. Now, as many people begin shifting their digital lives from their desktops to their homepages, online applications of the Google Docs variety have the potential to eat away at the supremacy of Office. Now, the European Union has slapped Microsoft with a $1.3 billion fine for noncompliance with a 2004 antitrust ruling.
A new meta-analysis of research on modern antidepressants-- some of it unpublished by the drug companies-- suggests that the drugs have little advantage over placebos.
Why then do so many people consider drugs like Prozac to be miracle drugs for depression-- many putting up with serious sexual side effects in order to take them? Are they simply being duped by a placebo effect or avoiding withdrawal symptoms? And how could drugs which are little different from placebo also produce suicidal or even homicidal thoughts in some patients?
Welcome to a very special episode of BlossomThe Monitor.
This week: Rounding up of the best stories from the AAAS annual meeting, questioning social networks, and an open call to viewers-- help us rename this show!
No, really. "The Monitor" needs a new name--preferably one that actually shows up in a Google search. Send your ideas to help.SciAm@gmail.com !
These cosmic associations go way back, at least back to when the Pythagoreans were whipping themselves into a perfect frenzy over the number 10. The best of the numbers, of course, are cosmic in both senses of the word (from Merriam-Webster):
(1) of or relating to the cosmos, the extraterrestrial vastness, or the universe in contrast to the earth alone
(2) of, relating to, or concerned with abstract spiritual or metaphysical ideas.
Scott Funkhouser, A visiting physics prof at The Citadel has given us another: 10^122.
What's next, goldfish on LinkedIN? No, really, a company called Botanicalls (zing) has figured out how to port their "plants that can phone you" technology to Twitter.
I'm torn about this. On the one hand, a service like this is probably the only way I'd ever keep a plant alive. On the other, having ambulatory, sentient beings in my friends-list is taxing enough already.
Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
from National Geographic News: A meteor zipped across the U.S. Pacific Northwest sky early Tuesday morning before exploding, possibly littering eastern Oregon with marble- to basketball-size space rocks, an expert says. Impact sites are yet to be found, according to Richard Pugh, a scientist with the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University in Oregon. Pugh is coordinating a search for potential meteorites. He said 40 to 50 eyewitnesses have contacted his lab to report the fireball. ... The meteor was first spotted over Washington State moving in an east-southeast direction. "The light was bright enough to wake up people even though the shades were pulled, and then the sonic boom hit, rattling windows and making the dust fly, and the dogs crawled under the bed," Pugh said.
Okay, once you start smashing or pulling atoms apart, they get pretty exciting, but IBM has just published its finding on just how little force it takes to move an atom: about one-130-millionth of an ounce of force (210 piconewtons) to push a cobalt atom across platinum or only one-1,600-millionth (17 piconewtons) of an ounce of force to shove at across copper.
It takes about 30 billion piconewtons to pick up a penny.
Geeks across the world rejoiced, now able to finish every work out (or gaming session) with a shout of "I hold the power of 130 million cobalt atoms in my hand! What type of guns are these? Yeah, atom-pushing guns."
Almost everyone — even the scientists among us — have likely had a brush with a lame science project of our own. I'll own up to copping out with the ubiquitous and ultra-lame "see what light grows plants best" experiment, and I seem to remember presenting a science project that had something to do with popcorn cooking times. Not my brightest moment.
But it takes real ingenuity to come up with a science project this great:
Those computers are hard to make, though. Nanotubes are, well, small and sometimes hard to work with, resulting in a lot of failure. IBM has a different take, though. Instead of arranging the nanotubes to replace traditional circuits by hand (or, more likely, traditional tools), Big Blue is stringing them together with DNA molecules. Once it's all put together, you slip the DNA out, and--ta dah!--you've got a grid of nanotubes
Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
from the New York Times (Registration Required): It's been called the whitest place on Earth, and at 90 degrees below zero, it could be the coolest place on the planet for astronomy. And so 17 Chinese astronomers, engineers and technicians boarded an old icebreaker last November, crunched into a harbor in East Antarctica and then set off on a 20-day, 1,000-mile trip across the snows to establish a new observatory at the bottom of the world. The observatory is called Plato, for the Plateau Observatory. For now it consists of a collection of boxes and towers holding seven small telescopes and cameras on a bump known as Dome Argus, which is 13,000 feet high and about 700 miles east of the South Pole. For the next year they will hold vigil alone, reporting by satellite radio through the long Antarctic night, but these instruments are the vanguard of great hopes.
Woo-hoo! I don't know if I'm more excited about the success of our military's efforts to destroy a wayward satellite because 1) it's a bold tactical, interstellar move, or 2) now we'll get to stop writingabout it. Either way, the Navy is "80-90 percent confident" that a missile aboard the U.S.S. Lake Erie took out most of the spy satellite, including that tank of poisonous hydrazine that caused such a hubbub. There's no official video of the takedown, but you can imagine that it went a little something like this:
Back around the turn of the century, some genius with a Burmese python realized his chosen pet was a lot more difficult to manage than a goldfish, so he dumped it in the Everglades. Meanwhile, another genius discovered the same thing and also released his or her Burmese python in the Everglades, and — voila! — by 2003, biologists with the park service confirmed an established breeding population of a 20-foot, 300-lb. snake.
But it gets better: See all the green space on the map? According to a new USGS survey, that represents the area of our country that climatically matches the python's historical range from Pakistan to Indonesia. Burmese pythons have already been spotted north and east of the Everglades, so it seems like only a matter of time before these highly adaptable reptiles spread even more.
Unsurprisingly, global warming could play a big part in the invasive animals' spread. Click through to see another USGS projection of the python's suitable range in 100 years:
The Big Bang, he says, is just one of many "bangs" in an infinite cycle of expansion and contraction between string-theoretical objects called "branes." Dark energy pulls two branes together and -- Ka-BLAMO -- they "separate and expand to form galaxies and stars."
Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
from the San Francisco Examiner: SYDNEY, Australia (Associated Press) - Scientists investigating the icy waters of Antarctica said Tuesday they
have collected mysterious creatures including giant sea spiders and huge worms in the murky depths. Australian experts taking part in an international
program to take a census of marine life in the ocean at the far south of the world collected specimens from up to 6,500 feet beneath the surface, and said
many may never have been seen before. Some of the animals far under the sea grow to unusually large sizes, a phenomenon called gigantism that scientists
still do not fully understand.
This isn’t going to shake up the big questions in cosmology, but it might change the way you think about the night sky. Those stars you see? They may not be where you think they are.
Gravitational lenses operate like funhouse mirrors in deep space. They can magnify, distort and bend the light from distant galaxies, and make them appear in different places than where you would expect. (No word yet on whether they can make galaxies look taller or thinner or shorter or heavier or wavier…) Gravitational lenses, as their name suggests, are usually giant galaxies so massive that they bend spacetime—and thus redirect light or anything else that happens to be traveling close by.
They can be helpful to astronomers: the magnification and redirection of light allows stargazers to see farther into deep space. And thus, farther back in time.
The Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS), led by Nick Scoville at Caltech, recently completed a long, hard look at a patch of the sky roughly equal to the area of 9 full moons (1.6 square degrees). The survey used data from the major league of telescopes: the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, and the VLT all contributed images. The researchers found 67 new gravitational lenses.
When it comes to the threat of antibiotic resistance, the World Health Organization doesn't mince words: some diseases, it says, "will have no effective therapies within the next ten years." Indeed, more than 70 percent of the bacteria that cause hospital-acquired infections are resistant to at least one of the antibiotics commonly used to treat them, and it's only going to get worse. But a chemical found on amphibian skin—produced in response to stress, injury, or contact with microorganisms—has just been found to kill some drug-resistant bacteria.
Breathalyzers are no longer just good for getting a DUI citation. Now when a police officer suspends your driver’s license he can throw in, “By the way, not only is your blood alcohol level over the legal limit, but according to my breathalyzer—you have an inoperable malignant brain tumor.” Indeed, scientists have found that by simply blasting a person's breath with laser light, you can detect specific molecules that will tell you whether or not they have specific diseases like diabetes or cancer.
Actually, this StarTrekish advancement is not intended to diagnose drunkenness (although it can do that too), but rather is meant to make professional medical diagnostics quicker, less expensive, less painful and potentially even more accurate that current methods. Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder say the advancement would allow doctors to simultaneously screen for a variety of conditions with a mere exhale. Known as optical frequency comb spectroscopy, the technology earned it’s creators a Nobel Prize in physics, and is powerful enough to sort through all the molecules in human breath while also being sensitive enough to distinguish rare molecules that can serve as biomarkers for specific diseases.
Every weekday, Sigma Xi,
the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the
mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
from Nature News: Is this really the most intense laser in the Universe? Yes,
that's what scientists working on the HERCULES laser at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor claim. ... This record-breaking beam actually has very low energy - at just 20 joules,
it is less than the 8,000 joules stored in a tic tac - but the energy is squeezed into a
tiny spot (1.3 micrometres in diameter, about a hundred times thinner than a human hair) for
a very short time, just 30 femtoseconds (10^-15 seconds). So the beam has an intensity of 2
x 10^22 watts per square centimetre: two orders of magnitude more intense than achieved
before.
War is bad and all, but recent news of an errant satellite and our military's plans to blow it out of the sky has stoked the fires of our Millennium Falcon-loving youth. Luckily, our thoughtful, do-gooder big brother spent less time breaking out the action figures and actually investigated the possibility of the U.S. and China engaging in a protracted arms race in outer space. Basically, the Pentagon is already thinking about it seriously, but astronomical (heh) costs and mitigating factors (debris in orbit from space battles could interfere with essential communications satellites) might hold us or the Chinese back from building a Death Star anytime soon.
Even cooler than the article, though, is the space weapons slideshow our sibling provided at no extra charge. It covers possible space weapons, connected technology, and the feasibility and costs of getting said super-weapons off the ground. Badass entries include: a ground-based antisatellite laser, kinetic-energy interceptors, offensive satellites, and space-based hypersonic bombers (pictured left). Yes! Way to go, bro!
Your weekly dose of science news, The Monitor, once again raises its ugly head. (No wait, that's just the Paul Janka lookalike in our second segment. Or the Predator in our third. Hey, it's that kind of week.)
In this episode: 3 new dinosaurs discovered (only 2 of which are cool), what hotornot.com tells us about the psychology of love, a disturbing map of human impact on the world's oceans, and a "virtual patient" that looks like Operation on steroids.
Just a note to say that Internet law scholar John Palfrey and friends have begun a campaign to get Lawrence Lessig to...campaign. For Congress. They want the man behind the alternative copyright system, Creative Commons, and the book/online social movement, Free Culture, to run for a seat, rather than merely criticizing Congressional decisions (which he does quite well—his blog shows him to be a master of the political flame).
The 
The last couple weeks have been filled with news on Microsoft. Microsoft attempts to acquire Yahoo! Microsoft invests $3 million in the development of healthcare applications. Microsoft gives away high-end software development tools to college students. Microsoft takes sides in the high-def DVD format war. Microsoft may partner with Netflix.
What's next, goldfish on LinkedIN? No, really, a company called Botanicalls (zing) 
Cambridge University physics prof Neil Turok 
When it comes to the threat of antibiotic resistance, the World Health Organization doesn't mince words: some diseases, it says, "will have no effective therapies within the next ten years." Indeed, more than 70 percent of the bacteria that cause hospital-acquired infections are resistant to at least one of the antibiotics commonly used to treat them, and it's only going to get worse. But a chemical found on amphibian skin—produced in response to stress, injury, or contact with microorganisms—has just been found to kill some drug-resistant bacteria.
War is bad and all, but recent news of an 
