It's Okay To Be Smart

"We have landed on a world where the faint sun glints off methane lakes, seen stars the size of..."

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:24:29 -0600

“We have landed on a world where the faint sun glints off methane lakes, seen stars the size of cities spin hundreds of times a second, and taken photographs of light from the beginning of time that has journeyed for over thirteen billion years to reach us. This is true wonder, with the power to deliver a dizzying feeling, the craving for which might be seen as the very definition of what it means to be human.”

- Brian Cox, Why Quantum Theory Is So Misunderstood (via cuckoocuckoo)

I sure wish there was a Google Street View for the world’s...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:08:45 -0600

I sure wish there was a Google Street View for the world’s coastal oceans.

Oh wait! There is! Behold the SeaView underwater virtual tour project! It’s incomplete right now, but the stuff that’s currently up shows how awesome this is going to be when it’s all done. The world’s coastal oceans are our canary in the coal mine of climate change. Through careful observation of the changes they are undergoing we can get an idea of how climate is affecting marine biology.

Go give it a whirl with this demo.

"Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world. In its..."

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:02:58 -0600

“Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming’s eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it — a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria — and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory?”

- From Systematic Wonder: A Definition of Science That Accounts for Whimsy

via Brain Pickings

This might be a horrifically stupid question but how does a...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:27:06 -0600

This might be a horrifically stupid question but how does a leap year work? Like, with space and the time it takes to make a revolution around the sun? I thought that’s what determined the length of our days, so every four years do we wobble off our axis? Also, you’re blog is the most informative and interesting blog, ever!

Not horrifically stupid at all. Leap years are pretty odd.

You’ve gotta realize that leap years are purely man-made. They don’t have to exist. Without them, the Earth would continue to orbit around the sun for the foreseeable future, with no care of how long it took to do so. But people care. We care. We have seasons, calendars, birthdays … our cultural milestones depend on a nice orderly calendar. At least for most of human history, anyway.

Leap years exist because the Earth actually takes ~365.25 days to orbit the sun. If we didn’t correct for this, our calendar would be off by several hours every year. So we add a day to make up for it, assuring that equinoxes, seasons and other human calendar comforts proceed without confusion. Can you imagine if all of a sudden December was during springtime? Santa would get sweaty.

Here’s the rules for determining a leap year:

The year is evenly divisible by 4, AND
If the year can be evenly divided by 100, it is NOT a leap year, UNLESS
The year is also evenly divisible by 400. Then it is a leap year.

So 2000 was a leap year, but 2100 will not be. This is because the orbit is a little less than 365.25 days when you start carrying out the decimals.

In closing, thank you. I’m glad you think this is the most interesting blog ever!

Would you guys all get horribly bored if I had a week where I did nothing but answer questions from...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:55:01 -0600

Would you guys all get horribly bored if I had a week where I did nothing but answer questions from my inbox?

Maybe like 4 days.

I need an intern.

I really enjoy this blog a lot! It's awesome knowing there are other people out there that care about science as much as I do c:

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:48:05 -0600

What if I care about it MORE than you? Because I care about it a lot. Wanna have a contest?

Thanks! Together we can restore wonder to the world.

"Without Hertz, we wouldn’t have wi-fi, iPhones, radio, Kinect, remote controls for our TVs or really anything that sends a signal to something else." This sentence that you posted yesterday has been playing on my mind. Are you sure that without Hertz that radio waves would not have been discovered? Do you think this much time could have passed without the discovery of radio waves? Are there any holes in science where something should have been discovered already but hasn't?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:38:26 -0600

I don’t mean for it to sound exclusive, as if he found it and therefore no one else would have, ever. That isn’t how discoveries like this work. Just look at Edison and Tesla’s War of Currents! He had countless competitors, and had Hertz not accomplished what he did, no doubt someone else would have.

But it would sure sound strange to describe a radio frequency in “kilo-johnsons” wouldn’t it? I’m glad it was Hertz.

I don't understand how would a loose cable cause this experiment to be wrong? The cable was anticipated to have a 60 nanosecond delay right? If the cable was loose the delay could have been longer say for example 75 nanoseconds. Wouldn't that just mean that the neutrinos traveled faster than previously thought?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:35:38 -0600

Your logic is correct, but there is a second possible error in the timing equipment that would have the effect of “slowing” the neutrinos down after it’s corrected for.

BBC has more details on the errors. Basically, these sources of error only provide possible ways that the experiment could be off. It will still take replication and analysis by other labs to either nail the coffin shut or pry it open.

approachingstarlight: Sorry neutrinos, just doin’ my...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:52:11 -0600

approachingstarlight:

Sorry neutrinos, just doin’ my job!

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/02/faster-than-light-neutrino-result-apparently-a-mistake-due-to-loose-cable.ars

He also checked his plugs, every time.

fuckyeahspaceexploration: 1963 NASA concept for a lunar landing...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:20:24 -0600

fuckyeahspaceexploration:

1963 NASA concept for a lunar landing module.

WHAT IS THIS?!

A lunar landing module for ANTS?!

The lunar landing module needs to be at least … THREE TIMES bigger than this!!

What Processed Food Looks Like During Digestion … Oh...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:16:36 -0600

What Processed Food Looks Like During Digestion … Oh YUCK.

If a Happy Meal can sit out for six months and not go bad, then it’s not surprising that processed foods can look pretty bad going through your digestive tract. Using a pill-sized remote comera, Stefani Bardin tracked processed versus perishable food through the caverns of digestion.

Enjoy. Just not while you’re eating.

(via Scientific American)

nprfreshair: This stunning 360 degree panorama of the night...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:49:00 -0600

nprfreshair:

This stunning 360 degree panorama of the night sky was stitched together from 37,000 images by a first-time astrophotographer.

I was gonna blog about that awesome record-setting, super-sized panoramic sky photo going around ourdashboards today, but I had this nagging sense of deja vu. And sure enough, I found it in my archives from 10 months ago.

But seriously, go enjoy it again. It’s so fantastic and informative. The guy quit his job, traveled 60,000 miles and he had never done anything like this before.

neuromatic replied to your photo: How Much Would It Cost to Build the Death Star? … It’s cool...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:52:48 -0600

neuromatic replied to your photo: How Much Would It Cost to Build the Death Star? …

It’s cool we got this.

Maybe we could build a budget version, like instead of a “Death” Star, make it a “Hurts Really Bad” Star.

The Honda Civic of planetary destroyers.

How Much Would It Cost to Build the Death Star? Any guesses? In...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:46:01 -0600

How Much Would It Cost to Build the Death Star?

Any guesses?

In 2012 dollars?

How about 13,000 times the world’s GDP? Yep.

Grandaddy of the Plants Meet Cyanophora paradoxa. This...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:55:00 -0600

Grandaddy of the Plants

Meet Cyanophora paradoxa.

This single-celled freshwater alga has recently shone some sunlight on the origin of plants on Earth. About 2.5 billion years ago, oxygen began to accumulate in our atmosphere, and since nothing had coped to use it, it led to perhaps the most extreme extinction event in the planet’s history. The source of much of that oxygen were tiny prokaryotic photosynthesizers called cyanobacteria.

But how did these single-celled prokaryotes become the redwoods, seaweeds and multitudes of other eukaryotic plants we see on Earth today? It all started with endosymbiosis. A team at Rutgers sequenced the genome of Cyanophora paradoxa, and discovered that it shares a lot of characteristics with the creature that first swallowed a cyanobacteria in order to become a photosynthesizer.

Using genome sequencing, they deduced that an amoeba-like predator likely absorbed the cyanobacteria, and, instead of digesting it, began to farm its energy. But that’s not all … it likely took a second endosymbiosis ingestion of an unrelated bacterium to give Cyanophora all the tools it needed to become the ancestor of the plants we know today.

(image via Rutgers Univ.)

FTL Neutrino-no

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:14:00 -0600

FTL Neutrino-no:

BREAKING NEWS: GPS Connector Error May Undo Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results

ScienceInsider is reporting (from still unconfirmed sources) that last year’s reports of faster-then-light neutrinos from CERN’s OPERA collaborative were due to a mistake. Specifically, a bad connection between a computer and a GPS unit.

Whoops.

Confused? Here’s a handful of my posts on the subject here and here. That will give you the background on the experiment that you need. For the neutrino particle to have traveled faster than the speed of light, as claimed, it would have thrown some wrenches into very hefty assumptions about modern physics. I was pretty skeptical of this, as were many others, so this being true wouldn’t surprise me.

Keep your eyes open for confirmation on the error. In the meantime, always check your connectors.

UPDATE: More on this from Phil Plait.

Today’s Google doodle celebrates the birthday of Heinrich...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:28:29 -0600

Today’s Google doodle celebrates the birthday of Heinrich Hertz, who proved the existence of electromagnetic waves.

It occurs to me that this is an accomplishment whose scale is often overlooked. Without Hertz, we wouldn’t have wi-fi, iPhones, radio, Kinect, remote controls for our TVs or really anything that sends a signal to something else.

laboratoryequipment: Technique Enables Fast Mass-Production of...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:11:57 -0600

laboratoryequipment:

Technique Enables Fast Mass-Production of Microbots

A new technique inspired by elegant pop-up books and origami will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet. Devised by engineers at Harvard, the ingenious layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of not just microrobots, but a broad range of electromechanical devices.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Technique-Enables-Fast-Mass-Production-of-Microbots-022112.aspx

I, for one, welcome our new pop-up microrobot overlords.

Also check out these DNA nanobots that target cancer cells and this awesome collection of computational origami.

In the Steps of Ancient Elephants

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:50:23 -0600

In the Steps of Ancient Elephants:

Brian Switek tells a story of a set of ancient tracks in what is now the UAE. They belonged to large prehistoric animals, and they were a mystery to us until only recently:

“One day, sometime around seven million years ago, a herd of bizarre, four-tusked elephants crossed the desert which stretched over what is now the United Arab Emirates. Thirteen of the behemoths plodded along together, perhaps moving towards one of the wide, slow rivers which nourished stands of trees in the otherwise the arid region. Sometime later, a solitary animal trudged across the herd’s path in another direction. We know all this because paleontologists have found the tracks of these massive animals.

Scientists were not the first people to wonder about the fossil footprints. The huge tracksite – which stretches over an area equivalent to seven soccer fields – had been a source of speculation among local Emirati people for years. Dinosaurs and even mythical giants were thought to have been responsible for the potholes. It wasn’t until the spring of 2001 that a resident of the area, Mubarak bin Rashid Al Mansouri, led researchers of the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey to the immense fossil field.

Dinosaurs had not created the tracks. The snapshot of time represented by the trace fossils came from the Miocene, sometime between six and eight million years ago – all the gargantuan non-avian dinosaurs had died out over 60 million years previously. Based upon the geological context and what had been found in the area before, fossil elephants were quickly identified as the trackmakers.”

MATTER, a new home for thrilling, in-depth, gripping science...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:39:58 -0600

MATTER, a new home for thrilling, in-depth, gripping science writing on the web.

It’s also a new Kickstarter project, and one that I support. Sure, I write a lot of short science content, and I think there’s a perfect home for it here, as a way to divert attention from the unimportant to the amazingness that surrounds us. A collection of enlightening and educational brain diversions.

But I also am passionate about work that digs deeper, that tells a richer story. And that’s what MATTER promises. It is a race to the bottom for most web outlets when it comes to science stories. It’s as if they ask “What’s the least amount of energy we can devote to this?” when we should be devoting as much energy as we can to celebrating the richness of science.

If I wasn’t such a busy grad student, I’d write that stuff too. I hope you’ll think of supporting efforts like this by backing the project, or at least demanding content like this in your life.

(via Kickstarter)