So I'm a technological optimist. By and large, I think that, ultimately, technology will solve all my problems. That is, of course, if it doesn't destroy the world first. Because, let's face it, science is kind of scary.
Thank the good lord Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho have their heads screwed on right. They've filed suit in a federal court in Honolulu to stop CERN from powering up the LHC until it's produced safety and environmental reports.
There you are again, at the 11th hour, wrapping that present.
Off comes the price tag, ‘snip’ goes the scissors, and you peel off a piece of tape. Except that the tape, sensing your hurry, tapers down to a point and leaves with a useless, triangular piece. So you try again, once you find the point that was left on the tape roll. And once again, you find your piece of tape narrowing, narrowing, narrowing.
The same *!@#$ phenomenon happens with wallpaper, too. You can’t just peel it off in a nice, even swath; no, it has to peel away from the wall in those deterministically infuriating triangles.
Well, for what it's worth, it’s not you, it’s physics.
Now, an MIT mathematician and his international team of colleagues officially christen that effect "The Wallpaper Problem.” More importantly, in the March 30 issue of Nature Materials, they try to explainwhy, using a model of the peeling problem that accurately predicts the angle of the triangle.
I've never been able to solve a Rubik's Cube. It's a personal failing I chalk up to mild ADD, horrible spatial organization skills, and the desire to not get beaten up in middle school. Somehow, none of that gets in the way of my interest in reading a 10-page paper proving that all formations of a Rubik's Cube can be solved in 25 moves or less.
Well, sort of. Fans of classic science fiction and/or campy Disney films will recall that squid and humans have a score to settle. But Captain Nemo will be happy to hear that our cephalopod friends may have finally repaid their debt to humankind.
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, my alma mater, have discovered a property of squid beaks that may lead to breakthroughs in the design of medical devices. They've answered a long-standing, deceptively simple conundrum: "Why don't squid hurt themselves?"
See, squid beaks are nasty, hard, sharp little things. Or, as UCSB biologist Herbert Waite so eloquently put it to the Associated Press:
"A dozen of them could eat you, or really hurt you a lot."
Squid, on the other hand, are soft, pulpy, boneless little creatures. How is it that they can clamp down on their prey with these knifelike little things and not hurt themselves at the same time? It'd be sort of like you or me trying to cut up a piece of cardboard using a pair of scissors that was missing a handle. The sharp part may be aimed at the box, but the ragged end that digs into your hand still hurts like hell.
The back end of that sharp beak, figured biologists, must be like ragged scissor handle on squishy squid body. But squid don't seem to mind, and so scientists asked that most fundamental question: "What's up with that?"
It’s a long-held assumption that humans harbor an innate fear of snakes and spiders as an evolutionary defense mechanism against the threats such creepy crawlies may pose. Moreover, recent studies have suggested that we possess an uncanny natural capacity to preferentially attend to—i.e. identify—bite-happy beasties so as to give them the wide berths we presume they warrant.
However, researchers at the University of Queensland posit that just because we notice potential dangers, doesn’t necessarily mean we fear them. Quoth Dr. Helena Purkis:
“We showed that although everyone preferentially attends to snakes or spiders in the environment as they are potentially dangerous, only inexperienced participants display a negative response.
“If we understand the relationship between preferential attention and emotion it will help us understand how a stimulus goes from being perceived as potentially dangerous, to eliciting an emotional response and to being associated with phobia."
Now that Expelled's producers have gained notoriety by expelling PZ Myers from a preview while failing to recognize Richard Dawkins, and reducing Jacob Bronowski's Ascent Of Man to the level of a Visine commercial, the search has begun for the missing links in the devolution of Ben Stein's dumbed down Darwin epic.
The first that has come to light, from a hard drive that survived the Y1K crisis, is this moving scene from the Bayeux Travesty --
Clouds complicate the measurement of climate change. Last year, for example, a couple of Colorado State students used CloudSat data to show that pollution by aerosols is causing the formation of more of those eerie, high altitude noctilucent clouds. (Said clouds are reportedly encroaching on the lower latitudes…) The increase in cloud cover resulted in an increase of reflected sunlight, which resulted in less solar radiation reaching the surface.
Now, a team of Ukrainian scientists argue that clouds are the only thing that matter when it comes to climate change. Well, almost. Clouds… and solar radiation. Basically, contrary to what almost every other scientist has been saying, they hypothesize that the big picture of climate change has little to do with carbon dioxide. There’s incoming solar radiation, and clouds that either reflect said radiation or reflect it back into space.
Here’s where cosmic rays come in, according to the Ukrainians: they cause an increase in cloud cover by ionizing the atmosphere, which forms aerosols, which leads to more clouds. Thus, cloud cover patterns should follow the same 11 year cycle that is observed in the Sun’s magnetic field, which corresponds the influx of cosmic rays.
Is it time to throw out any inconvenient truths out there?
Space methane suggests the possibility of space cows, space robots are serving their NASA masters (for now), and why is everything in space made of matter? RIP Arthur C. Clarke.
Thanks so much for all the name suggestions, everyone! However, we decided that this whole name-change plan was flawed from the get-go. Watch our rationalization below. And you can view all the name suggestions after the jump.
Also in this episode: the Hobbit controversy rages on, science+religion = new sins, and drugs in your tap water.
Despite the threat of a future in which we have few defenses against deadly bacterial infections, Americans don't seem to be too freaked out. We're still awfully good at over-using antibiotics (by, for instance, using them to treat the wrong types of infections) and not completing antibiotic treatment, both of which increase the risk of bacterial resistance, according to an abstract presented today at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta, Georgia.
Last Wednesday, the Cassini spacecraft whizzed through a giant geyser bursting from the surface of Enceladus, one of Saturn's tiny moons. Cassini’s cameras were poised to take new pictures of Enceladus, and an onboard tool was supposed to analyze the composition of the geyser.
Those Enceladan outbursts, hundreds of miles tall, are curious beasts. Scientists suspect they contain ice and rocky debris, but how such a small and cold body can host these powerful plumes remains a mystery. Is there a watery ocean trapped under the frozen surface? Where does all this energy come from? To add mystery to mystery, last month, we learned that Saturn’s outermost ring actually sops up debris from the geysers.
Well, at least Cassini’s camera worked! (The image above is from NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.) And so did four of the other devices. The new pictures deliver new details on the polar regions of the moon, which is only about 310 miles in diameter. But we’ll have to wait a few months for an inside look at the geysers.
I love public television. Still, it's not known as an outlet for thrill seekers. It seldom provides its viewers with an adrenaline rush. Nonetheless, PBS does stage memorable television events, and one of them was the documentary, Cadillac Desert, accompanied by Marc Reisner's best-selling book of the same name.
Reisner chronicles in mostly-riveting, though sometimes mind-numbing, detail the great Westward Migration in America and its dependence on a dwindling, non-renewable water supply. The intrigue and politics of water, says Reisner, have been the driving force in shaping the American West, and in the end there simply will not be enough of it. When it runs out, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed inevitably by a great Eastward Migration.
Readers of Cadillac Desert will remember one of the most notorious events in California History, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which occurred eighty years ago this week. Early Twentiety-Century celebrity, Los Angeles water engineer William Mulholland (as in Mulholland Drive) had just watched a proposal to strip yet more water from the Owens Valley go sour. He desperately needed to find a way to satisfy LA's growing water addiction, and in the end he decided to expand the size of an already-large dam in the nearby San Francisquito Canyon. This proved to be a lousy idea.
The BBC has a fun article chock full of fun pi facts (e.g., today's also Einstein's birthday) and history (the current record for digits-computed is 1.24 trillion).
Last month when American Airlines flew its pampered pentad of passengers from Chicago to London, the carbon footprint left by burning 22,000 gallons of fuel during a virtually empty flight more resembled a carbon foot in Mother Nature's ass.
Environmentalists flew, presumably fossil fuel-free, through the roof. Defenders of the industry loudly countered by pointing out the harsh pragmatics of airline scheduling. Others, sensing opportunity, derided the likes of Al Gore and similar activists for hypocritically jet-setting across the globe to deliver messages of environmental responsibility.
American Airlines, which lost about $60,000 on the much-maligned voyage, won’t have to worry about such fiascos starting at the end of this month. On March 30, the Open Skies agreement takes effect, allowing any US and EU airline to make transatlantic flights between all destinations on both sides of the pond. London’s Heathrow airport will be opened for full competition from foreign carriers with an expected monthly increase of 524 flights to the States as well as 5,853 new trips throughout Europe. Until mankind builds the first trans-oceanic bike path, we’re going to have untold millions more tons of CO2 floating around the friendly skies.
In the past six months we’ve heard a couple grand and divergent pronouncements regarding two of the world’s deadliest diseases. David Baltimore recently waxed hopeless on the prospect of finding an HIV vaccine, in what amounts to a sober echo of Chris Rock’s resigned vision of the future:
"Yo, man, you weren't at work yesterday. What's up?''
''My AlDS is acting up."
''You know, when the weather get like this, my AlDS just pop up."
''But l took some Robitussin. l'm fine now!''
Conversely, opponents of malaria aren’t blinking as of yet. Indeed, they’re digging in for a fight. In October, in front of 300 of the globe’s leading malaria experts, Melinda Gates delivered a message of almost scandalous optimism: “The only way to end death malaria is to end malaria,” she boomed. The London Observer chronicles the response:
What she meant, and it provoked gasps from her audience, was 'end' as in 'eradicate' - known as the 'e' word in the malaria community because of its almost taboo status, so improbably, unscientifically dreamy does the task appear.
The astronomy quote of the week comes from Aussie astronomer Peter Tuthill:
"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel."
The end could be closer than we thought.
In the March 1st Astrophysical Journal, Tuthill reports on a photogenic binary star system he’s been watching for some time. The dancing duo is a Wolf-Rayet system, which means that one of the stars is dangerously unstable. As in, close to going supernova. The press release calls it a “ticking time bomb.”
For 8 years, Tuthill has believed himself lucky for getting such a nice angle to watch the spiraling star from. Here’s how he describes an image of it (posted on the next page of this post) on his web site:
A sequence of 11 sharp frames show the elegant spiral nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius to be rotating in a circle every 8 months, keeping precise time like a jewel in a cosmic clock. In the image to the left [follow the jump to the next page to see it], we have rotated the camera frame of each of the 11 images so as to follow the motion, and as a result we can stack all our images into a single false-colour composite.
But Tuthill’s stellar view of the star could be bad news for Spaceship Earth.
Methane-filled cow toots have long been the bane of environmentalists and pythonophobes everywhere (see also: megacorporations and carbon dioxide).
Now there's a chance that at least one thing coming out of cows could actually help stop global warming.
"When most people see a pile of manure, they see a pile of manure. We saw it as an opportunity for farmers, for utilities, and for California," said David Albers, dairyman and collaborater in The Vintage Dairy Biogas Project.
Thanks so much for the massive outpouring of new name suggestions! Keep sending 'em. We're taking next week off, but then after that... a newly named show will emerge from the glistening chrysalis of the old.
And now, the all-apocalypse episode: a doomsday vault for seeds, tracking a killer asteroid, targeting antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and contemplating a real-life Cylon attack.
Here's my question: did the investigators control for the fact that most nursing homes are such soul-destroying places that residents could probably be "cheered up" by a #&*%ing pet rock, much less some cheesy plastic dog-droid?
Yes, let's find that sweet spot: the minimum possible threshold for maintaining our elderly folks' mental health combined with the mimimum number of biological beings involved. Hell, why not just swap out AIBOs for Roombas? Granny gets "quality time" AND the floor gets cleaned! She'll never know the difference!
No seriously! 
From the Inadvertent Findings Dept.: 
