Science & TechnologyS


Pi

Famous prime number conjecture one step closer to proof

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Mon, 20 May 2013 12:54 UTC
Prime Numbers
© Andreas Guskos | Shutterstock.comNew research reveals an infinite number of prime numbers exist that are separated by a distance of at most 70 million.
Infinity down, only 69,999,997 to go.

New research has proven that prime numbers don't just disappear as numbers get larger - instead, there is an infinite number of prime numbers separated by a distance of at most 70 million.

The new proof, accepted this month for publication in the journal Annals of Mathematics, takes the field one step closer to solving the twin prime conjecture, a famous mathematical idea that suggests the existence of an infinite number of prime numbers separated by a distance of 2 (for example, the prime numbers 11 and 13, which are separated by 2). Prime numbers are those that are divisible by only themselves and 1.

Prior to this discovery, mathematicians suspected there were infinitely many twin primes, or prime numbers separated by two, but proofs hadn't set bounds on how far apart primes could be separated. [The 9 Most Massive Numbers in Existence]

"It's a huge step forward in terms of showing that there are primes close together," said Daniel Goldston, a mathematician at San Jose State University in California. "It's a big huge step toward the twin prime conjecture."
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Galaxy

Cloud mystery: Climate change and cosmic rays


Objective Science
Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:00 UTC
Henrik Svensmark's documentary on climate change and cosmic rays. Henrik Svensmark (born 1958) is a physicist and professor in the Division of Solar System Physics at the Danish National Space Institute (DTU Space) in Copenhagen.

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Question

Human Cloning? Stem cell advance reignites ethics debate

Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience
Fri, 17 May 2013 11:42 UTC
Human Cloning
© Cell, Tachibana et al.Researchers remove the genetic material from an unfertilized human egg cell in the first step toward creating a cloned human embryo
A new stem cell discovery has reawakened controversy about human cloning - though technical challenges mean scientists are far from being able to create human babies as in Michael Bay's 2005 sci-fi flick "The Island."

Not that they would even want to.

"Nobody in their right mind would want to do that," said John Gearhart, the director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study. And indeed, the research wasn't conducted with the idea of creating cloned mini-me's in mind. Instead, scientists attempting to treat diseases of the cell's powerhouse, the mitochondria, refined the technique, which is the same one used to create the cloned sheep Dolly in 1996.

But the parallels between the animal-cloning procedure and the new human one have triggered concern. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) swiftly issued a statement condemning the research, both on the grounds that embryos were destroyed in the research process and over the concern that the full reproductive cloning of humans is on its way.

"They or others may be close to being able to develop cloned human embryos to the fetal stage and then beyond," said Richard Doerflinger, the associate director of USCCB's Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities.
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Fireball

Close approach of Asteroid (285263) 1998 QE2

Ernesto Guido & Nick Howes
Remanzacco Observatory
Fri, 17 May 2013 16:59 UTC
Asteroid (285263) 1998 QE2 was discovered on Aug. 19, 1998, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program.

1998 QE2 has an estimated size of 1.3 km - 2.9 km (based on the object's absolute magnitude H=16.6). It was observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope by Trilling et al. (2010), who estimated that it has a diameter of 2.7 km and a dark optical albedo of 0.06. This asteroid will have a close approach with Earth at about 15.2 LD (Lunar Distances = ~384,000 kilometers) or 0.0392 AU (1 AU = ~150 million kilometers) at 2059 UT on 2013 May 31 and it will reach the peak magnitude ~10.8 on May 31 around 2300 UT.

(285263) 1998 QE2 will be a great Goldstone radar target May 30 through June 9. This is going to be one of the best radar targets of the year. Radar images from the Goldstone antenna could achieve resolutions as fine as 3.75 meters.

We performed some follow-up measurements of this object, from the Q62 iTelescope network (Siding Spring) on 2013, May 17.36, through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + f/4.5 focal reducer.
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Question

Why are there so few lefties in China?

Larry O'Hanlon
Discovery News
Fri, 17 May 2013 06:00 UTC
Wang Nan
© CrobisWang Nan competes at the Beijing Olympic Games. Table tennis is one of the few areas where being left-handed in China is an advantage.
In 2/3 of the world it's still unlucky to be born a leftie, says a researcher who has taken a new look at attitudes about left-handed people worldwide.

In China, in particular, less than 1 percent of students are reportedly left-handed, despite a global average of 10 to 12 percent of humans preferring their left hand, reports Howard Kushner, a researcher and Professor of Science and Society at Emory University in Atlanta. It's not that there are fewer people born left-handed in China or necessarily that there are negative attitudes about lefties there. It's just that being left-handed is especially impractical.

"If you have to cater a huge society, you can't cater to the other side," Kushner said. And with 88 to 90 percent of the population right-handed, and some written characters requiring a right hand, that's what wins out, at least when it comes to writing. Kushner summarized the situation for Chinese southpaws in an article in the June edition of the journal Endeavour.

So is left-handedness going extinct in China? Probably not, says Kushner, because there doesn't seem to be a simple genetic basis for handedness.

What's more, studies on Chinese-Americans in California show a similar rate of left-handers as the rest of the U.S. population -- so there is nothing about being Chinese or Asian that makes a person less prone to being left-handed. But being born in China does mean you will likely be forced to function as a right-hander, Kushner concludes.
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Laptop

When will the human mind upload to a computer?

Eric Niiler
Discovery News
Fri, 17 May 2013 11:15 UTC
Digital Brain
© DiscoveryNews
In the new techno-thriller Upload, a young computer scientist with a sketchy past and distrust of society decides to take the ultimate leap forward by scanning his brain and uploading his memories, personality and consciousness into a simulated world of his own making.

Raymond wants to live forever, controlling his environment and interactions with other humans as a god-like being.

The novel by author Mark McClelland is set in the Michigan of 2070 about the time that futurists like Ray Kurzweil predict that "singularity" will be reached, the moment when machine learning will surpass human intelligence. It's not the first science-fiction tale to explore human-computer hybrids (see What are Little Girls Made Of in the first season of the original Star Trek series) or even the perils of virtual reality becoming too real (see the "Matrix" triology). But it does posit some questions that real-world researchers are just now tackling.

The European Union, for example, recently announced it was funding a $1.3 billion project to build a human brain on a silicon substrate. That's about 1 1/2 cents per neuron. Swiss neuroscientist Henry Markham, who is behind the Human Brain Project, has already started work on building a simulated rat brain.
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Robot

Hedonistic robots could destroy humanity

Marshall Honorof
TechNewsDaily
Fri, 17 May 2013 14:52 UTC
Robot
© Shutterstock
Complex robots are like animals: They learn by doing. Future robots may even respond to reward systems: complete a task with aplomb, and a gain a "feeling" of satisfaction for a job well done.

While this technology could create more efficient, goal-oriented robots, it could also have some very dire ramifications for humanity. After all, robots that feel rewarded by making humans happy may eventually decide that if no humans exist, no human will ever be unhappy again.

"Robots without preferences can't have complicated behaviors," Roman V. Yampolskiy, director of the Cybersecurity Research Lab at the University of Louisville, told TechNewsDaily. "To make machines which are independent and creative, we need to give them rewards and preferences."

While Yampolskiy believes that robots can be indispensible tools, he also warns that as they learn to seek rewards, they may learn to circumvent helping humans. "I am trying to make sure that any AI software we develop is safe to use and beneficial to humanity," he said.

Yampolskiy asserts that robots with the capacity for feelings of pleasure would, in all likelihood, take all the same shortcuts that humans use to acquire it. In a recent paper, he described the process of "wireheading," which sent an electric jolt through the pleasure center of a rat's brain. "The rat's self-stimulation behavior completely displaced all interest in sex, sleep, food and water, ultimately leading to premature death," Yampolskiy wrote.
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Fireball 5

Huge rock crashes into moon, sparks giant explosion

Clara Moskowitz
SPACE.com
Fri, 17 May 2013 12:43 UTC
Moon Impact
© NASAThis artist's illustration shows a meteor crashing into the surface of the moon. Scientists say hundreds of space rocks impact the lunar surface every year.
The moon has a new hole on its surface thanks to a boulder that slammed into it in March, creating the biggest explosion scientists have seen on the moon since they started monitoring it.

The meteorite crashed on March 17, slamming into the lunar surface at a mind-boggling 56,000 mph (90,000 kph) and creating a new crater 65 feet wide (20 meters).

The crash sparked a bright flash of light that would have been visible to anyone looking at the moon at the time with the naked eye, NASA scientists say.

"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office said in a statement.

"It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before."
Moon Impact_1
© NASAThis photo shows the bright flash of the light that resulted from a huge boulder slamming into the moon's surface March 17, 2013.
NASA astronomers have been monitoring the moon for lunar meteor impacts for the past eight years, and haven't seen anything this powerful before.

Scientists didn't see the impact occur in real time. It was only when Ron Suggs, an analyst at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., reviewed a video of the bright moon crash recorded by one of the moon monitoring program's 14-inch telescopes that the event was discovered.

"It jumped right out at me, it was so bright," Suggs said.

Scientists deduced the rock had been roughly 1-foot-wide (between 0.3 to 0.4 meters) and weighted about 88 lbs (40 kg).The explosion it created was as powerful as 5 tons of TNT, NASA scientists said.

When researchers looked back at their records from March, they found that the moon meteor might not have been an isolated event.

Comment: It's rather nice of NASA to just now inform us of this though there were rumors of this event and nothing to attach to it at the time from the MSM. Just for fun, take a peek at the large number of meteor sightings here on the BBM around that same time.

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Comet

1998 QE2 asteroid as big as 19 Royal Cruise liners


IBTimes.co.uk
Fri, 17 May 2013 16:02 UTC
Nasa scientists are getting excited about seeing the QE2 in the hope it will reveal crucial new insights. But it is not Her Majesty's defunct steam liner which is lying in dock in Dubai which has set stargazers in Houston, Texas, agog. The object is an asteroid flying through space which is as big as 19 of the former royal vessel. It measures 1.7 miles in length.
Image
1998 QE2 is set to come close to our world when it flys past in its orbit of the sun, on May 31. Scientists will use the Near Earth Object (NEO) event to help plan for an audacious bid to land on a lump of space rock in four years time as part of asteroid defence planning. Nasa scientist Lance Benner said: Whenever an asteroid approaches this closely, it provides an important scientific opportunity to study it in detail to understand its size, shape, rotation, surface features, and what they can tell us about its origin.

"We will also use new radar measurements of the asteroid's distance and velocity to improve our calculation of its orbit and compute its motion farther into the future than we could otherwise." Earth's upcoming brush with an extra-terrestial object should not contain the risk of causing chaos for us on earth, like the Russian meteor earlier this year. 1998 QE2 shall fly past earth 3.6m miles above our heads. A Nasa spokesman claimed there is no connection between the asteroid and the British royal cruise ship.
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Fireball 5

Asteroid 1998 QE2 to sail past earth


NASA
Wed, 15 May 2013 13:49 UTC
Asteroid 1998 QE2
© NASA/JPL-CaltechAsteroid 1998 QE2 will get no closer than about 3.6 million miles at time of closest approach on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. Pacific (4:59 p.m. Eastern).
On May 31, 2013, asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail serenely past Earth, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon. And while QE2 is not of much interest to those astronomers and scientists on the lookout for hazardous asteroids, it is of interest to those who dabble in radar astronomy and have a 230-foot (70-meter) -- or larger -- radar telescope at their disposal.

"Asteroid 1998 QE2 will be an outstanding radar imaging target at Goldstone and Arecibo and we expect to obtain a series of high-resolution images that could reveal a wealth of surface features," said radar astronomer Lance Benner, the principal investigator for the Goldstone radar observations from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Whenever an asteroid approaches this closely, it provides an important scientific opportunity to study it in detail to understand its size, shape, rotation, surface features, and what they can tell us about its origin. We will also use new radar measurements of the asteroid's distance and velocity to improve our calculation of its orbit and compute its motion farther into the future than we could otherwise."

The closest approach of the asteroid occurs on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. Pacific (4:59 p.m. Eastern / 20:59 UTC). This is the closest approach the asteroid will make to Earth for at least the next two centuries. Asteroid 1998 QE2 was discovered on Aug. 19, 1998, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program near Socorro, New Mexico.
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