Our Amazing World

A few things that have made this year Amazing (so far).

-a baby was cured of HIV (NYT)

-LED light bulbs are now less than $10 (TechReview)

-a meteorite was filmed by a lot of people (AtlanticWire)

-you can order a drone that fits in your hand (Wired)

-a person had 75% of their skull replaced via 3D printer (SydneyMorningHerald)

-anything can be 3D scanned and then 3D printed (Verge)

-two rats had their brains connected across the Internet (Wired)

-teleportation across a lake (Ars)

Science Of Interest

[Recent links of scientific interest, and by recent I mean since March, 2011]

-SciAm: Bison versus Mammoths: New Culprit in the Disappearance of North America's Giants

-NewSci: Vikings' crystal clear method of navigation

-NPR: New 'Giant' Species Of Crayfish Found In Tennessee Creek

-Wired: Shark Teeth Found Stuck in Ancient Ammonite Shell

-80Beats: Scientists Find First Evidence That Weather Affects Movement of Tectonic Plates

-SurprisingScience: Gigantic Plume Beneath Yellowstone Now Even More Gigantic

-The Rach 3 recordings page

-Wired: Gut-Bacteria Mapping Finds Three Global Varieties

-80Beats: Ancient Stone Structures Herded Gazelles to Mass Slaughter [like Lake Huron?]

-SciAm: How Science Stopped BP's Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

-Time: More Proof That Vikings Were First to America

...a small group of Icelanders — roughly 350 in total — carried a lineage known as C1, usually seen only in Asians and Native Americans.

-PhysOrg: New theory proposed to explain Pioneer probe gravitational anomaly

-Wired: Lava Lamp Action Helped Create Grand Canyon

-USGS: US Topo – A New National Map Series

-Dr. Jeff: America's Achilles' heel: the Mississippi River's Old River Control Structure

-Spacenews: U.S. Weather Satellites Saw Tornado Swarm Coming 5 Days Out

-TR: Atmosphere Above Japan Heated Rapidly Before M9 Earthquake

-Wired: Hot, Rocky Pancake Formed Hawaiian Islands

-Wired: Humans Could Have Geomagnetic Sight

-SciAm: The Behavioral Immune System

-EarthSky: Discovery of new force driving Earth’s tectonic plates

-BBC: Gravity satellite yields 'Potato Earth' view

-EarthSky: MIT discovery: A drug to cure nearly any virus

-SciAm: Solar System Likely Once Had Another Gas-Giant Planet

-Wired: Recent Human Evolution Detected in Quebec Town History

-Wired: Ozone Gas May Signal Coming Earthquakes

-EarthSky: Was a fifth gas giant ejected from our solar system?

-Wired: Multicellular Life Evolves in Laboratory

-PhysOrg: Anthropologists clarify link between Asians and early Native-Americans: A tiny mountainous region in southern Siberia may have been the genetic source of the earliest Native Americans, according to new research by a University of Pennsylvania-led team of anthropologists.

-WaPo: Radical theory of first Americans places Stone Age Europeans in Delmarva 20,000 years ago

-Smithsonian | Surprising Science: Clovis People Hunted Canada’s Camels

-EarthSky: Correlation between tornadoes and activity recorded by seismographs
[very interesting that seismographs picked up noise before the tornadoes formed]

-Atlantic: Superweeds: A Long-Predicted Problem for GM Crops Has Arrived

-PhysOrg: How religion promotes confidence about paternity [in other words, the world's major religions were founded to keep control of women's sexuality]

-PhysOrg: Research finds Stonehenge was monument marking unification of Britain

-Wired: Spectacularly Preserved Fossil Suggests Most Dinosaurs Were Feathered

-Discover/80Beats: Star Formation is Coming to a Close

-Wired: Top Scientific Discoveries of 2012

-Ars: No absolutes: How shifting plates completely remake the Earth

-SciAm: The Most Fascinating Human Evolution Discoveries of 2012

Hoping This Science News Is Unrelated

Wired: Mystery Fossils Link Fungi to Ancient Mass Extinction

SciAm: Mystery Goo in Alaska Is Made of Fungal Spores

Things That Seem Related

Feels like there is a short line between these two items.

St. Pete Times: Billionaire's role in hiring decisions at Florida State University raises questions

...George Mason University, a public university in Virginia which has received more than $30 million from Koch over the past 20 years.

Wired: Climatology-Defying Paper Yanked for Plagiarism

The report in question was prepared by Edward Wegman of George Mason University. In it, he criticized the methods used to generate a version of the hockey stick graph generated by Michael Mann, a Penn State climatologist.

A Seiche On Whitefish Bay

UpNorthLive: Urgent water level warning

URGENT - IMMEDIATE BROADCAST REQUESTED
COASTAL HAZARD MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GAYLORD MI
1115 AM EDT WED MAY 11 2011

...SEICHE DEVELOPING ON WHITEFISH BAY AND SAULT LOCKS...

.STRONG SOUTHEAST WINDS GUSTING OVER 50 KNOTS HAS RESULTED IN A
SEICHE DEVELOPING ON WHITEFISH BAY AND AT THE SAULT LOCKS...WHERE
WATER LEVELS ARE RISING AND FALLING RAPIDLY DUE TO WATER BEING
PUSHED TO THE WEST SIDE OF THE BAY DUE TO THE STRONG WINDS. THE
WATER THEN SLOSHES BACK TO THE EAST SIDE. OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL
HOURS THIS STANDING WAVE WILL DAMPEN OUT...BUT PERSONS ALONG THE
SHORE OF WHITEFISH BAY MAY EXPERIENCE WATER LEVEL CHANGES OF UP TO
2 FEET OVER A SHORT TIME PERIOD.

Can Surface Events Affect Subsurface Structures?

Wired: Can Hurricanes Trigger Earthquakes?

The hypothesis presented is that moving surface mass can affect the pressures on a fault zone causing it to release.

However, what is not tested is whether infiltration of water from the 2008 tropical storms into the faults could have led to thixotropy in 2010 - where the strain already on the faults was released by the addition of water. This process is already well understood and it would fit the timeline better than the mass wasting events.

The Universe As Simulation

I'm not the first person to think this. Search the web for "universe is a simulation evidence" and you get lots of good results.

Caching, prefetching, buffer overflows - terms from computing where an attempt is made to make information available before it is asked for or having information located where it shouldn't be located.

These are the terms I thought about when I read this at NPR: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

Experimentation appears to indicate that the Future can leak into the Present. As far as I know there is not a biological explanation for this. However, we have a computational analogy for this happening.

Makes you think the Ancient Alien theory isn't so crazy after-all, perhaps they are just checking in on their grand simulation.

Science!

Some recent science news of interest.

Wired: Dying Moon May Have Spawned Saturn’s Rings

SciAm: Blood from Stone: How Fossils Can Preserve Soft Tissue

TR: Spacecraft Saw ULF Radio Emissions over Haiti before January Quake

TR: Elegant New Theory Explains Origin Of Asteroid Belt

How Is This Not News? - Peak Production Was 70 Mb/d

From the IEA via TO: Projection: Peak Oil Happened in 2006

"Crude oil production will more or less stabilize around 68-69 Mb/d (millions of barrels per day) towards 2020, but will never return to the record level of 70Mb/d it achieved in 2006."

Evolutionary Psychology In The Bedroom

Fascinating experiment in Germany shows how we're all the same deep down. We're all scared of predators. See M2:Bedroom Layouts Reflect Ancestors’ Preferences

Government Working

Earlier this year Steven Chu told BP how to use gamma rays to image their broken well.

Now another example of American government scientists helping private industry solve a problem.

See TheAtlantic: How NASA Engineers Helped Rescue Trapped Chilean Miners

Something to remember when some argue that government can't accomplish anything, the private industry is always better, science is flawed, etc.

I Don't Think This Is A Good Thing

A large influx of freshwater into the ocean can turn off ocean currents which halts the transfer of heat from the equator to the poles. (See Shutdown of thermohaline circulation)

UCIrvine: 18 percent more water fed into the world’s oceans from rivers and melting polar ice sheets in 2006 than in 1994, with an average annual rise of 1.5 percent.

[Via Juan Cole]

"The Earth Isn't Fragile; We Are"

A couple of reminders of this fact:

Esquire: The Ocean Is Not in Trouble

NYT: Which Comes First – Peak Everything or Peak Us?

Really Old School

Geologists think they have found pristine mantle up in Canada.

Via SciAm: Tricky Mantle: Intact Pocket of Ancient Earth May Have Escaped Mixing for 4.5 Billion Years

New research indicates that rocks from Baffin Island in Canada stem from a patch of Earth that dates back to the infancy of the planet but has somehow escaped geologic recycling and processing since that time.

Elections Matter OR Evidence That Government Agencies Matter

Elections matter because of who the elected officials appoint. When those people are competent then government can be effective.

What is prompting this for me is how Energy Secretary Steven Chu told BP how to get images of their failed oil well. That's right - a government official helped a private company because the government knew more.

See TheAtlantic: How Steven Chu Used Gamma Rays to Save the Planet

An eternal fact of Washington is that government gets much more attention when it performs badly than when it performs well...


Now consider Chu, the Nobel Prize Winner who has been at BP headquarters in Houston with a team of government scientists trying to figure out how to stop the leak. According to a government official, BP initially "dismissed" Chu's gamma ray suggestion, but came back a week later and admitted "Chu's right."

Ha! And I believe this is an example of epistemic closure:

Slick

In the past I have read about the idea of purposely releasing oil or other material onto the ocean's surface to abate approaching hurricanes.

Could the Gulf Of Mexico oil leak could protect the area from hurricanes this summer? If the slick gets dispersed far enough then it may be possible to snuff out Caribbean born hurricanes. Dr. Jeff Masters has more on the topic: How oil might affect a hurricane

The Fierceness Of The New Madrid Earthquake May Have Been Exaggerated

Via SciAm: New Madrid quake analysis rewrites history books

Eating Non-Fat Is Nonsense

Or Atkins was right.

Via SciAm: Carbs against Cardio: More Evidence that Refined Carbohydrates, not Fats, Threaten the Heart

Three Species Of Orca

Not one.

See SciAm: Orcas are more than one species, gene study shows

This reminds me of something I saw on television recently that showed Orca's had somehow learned that if they could launch a surprise attack on a Great White Shark and then hold it upside down for 15 minutes then they could have their way with it. It was amazing.

See DailyMailUK: Pictured: The moment a whale delivers a deadly 'karate chop' blow to a killer shark

That's So Gay

Or as the linked article ends, "mating isn't only about multiplying".

There are more than 450 vertebrate species that get busy with the same gender. So not sure how homosexuality can be considered unnatural.

See the Frontal Cortex: Gay Animals