Science & TechnologyS


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Michelangelo's Scribbled Thoughts Reveal the Tortured Poet

Nick Squires
The Telegraph, UK
Sun, 05 Dec 2010 08:47 UTC
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© Getty ImagesMichelangelo scribbled notes on about a third of his drawings
Michelangelo scribbled jokes, thoughts and mundane shopping lists in the margins of his artistic sketches, providing a fascinating insight into his moods and artistic genius, a new book reveals.

The Renaissance artist is best known for great works such as the statue of David and the Sistine Chapel ceiling but he also left behind around 600 cartoons and drawings.

The scraps of writing on about a third of the drawings include lines of poetry, memos to his assistants, explanatory notes to some of his greatest works and "achingly personal expressions of ambition and despair surely meant for nobody's eyes but his own", according to Leonard Barkan, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University.

In the margin of one drawing he carefully documented the money he had spent on chickens, oxen and his father's funeral.

Next to a drawing of a Madonna and child he wrote a parody of a love poem that began: "You have a face sweeter than boiled grape juice, and a snail seems to have passed over it."
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Italy: Michelangelo's "Pieta Prototype" Unveiled in Rome

Nick Squires
The Telegraph, UK
Fri, 03 Dec 2010 01:00 UTC
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© The TelegraphThe terra-cotta at the beginning of the restorations
A tiny winged Cupid is one of the key clues to identifying a long-lost statue as the work of Michelangelo, art historians believe.

Experts are convinced that a recently discovered terracotta statue of the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus after his Crucifixion was the model for Michelangelo's renowned 'Pieta' sculpture in marble, today in St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

They say Michelangelo created the small, 30cm-high statue 500 years ago in order to convince a wealthy French cardinal to commission him to produce the much larger work, which he completed in 1499.

The model consists of three figures - Christ, the Virgin Mary and a small Cupid, whose head and wings are broken off and missing.

Cupids were pagan in origin - based on the Greek god of love Eros and also represented in Roman mythology.

"The only artist with the nerve, the colossal chutzpah, to put a pagan figure in a statute that was destined for the Vatican, was Michelangelo," Roy Doliner, an art historian who is convinced the terracotta model was created by the Renaissance master, told The Daily Telegraph.
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Lights Out Coming for Incandescents in US

Holly Deyo
Millennium Ark
Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00 UTC
60 watt bulb
© unknown
Nanny-State America Strikes Again

This is a reminder if you want to continue using incandescent light bulbs, now is the time to stock up. More nanny-state America is about to descend on us.

When first reading World Net Daily's article four years ago, 2014 seemed light years away, if you'll pardon the pun. Now phasing out incandescent bulbs is a few short months from kicking in. Californians will begin their goodbye to incandescent bulbs in 30 days; the rest of us have next year as grace period.

Some U.S. retailers have already quit carrying our old standbys. They are no longer obtainable in any wattage at our brick-and-mortar Sam's Club though they can be purchased through them online. Other retailers have not been so quick to hop the ban bandwagon and they can still be bought for reasonable costs at Walmart, K-Mart and most hardware stores.
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Cosmic News: Lots More Stars than "Billions and Billions"


Planet Save
Sat, 04 Dec 2010 14:34 UTC
Galaxy_1
© NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO TeamThe Center of Globular Cluster Omega Centauri.
Counting the number of stars in the known universe would seem to be a monstrous task akin to counting the number of grains of sand on all the world's beaches. Of course, no one literally "counts" each and every star, or grain of sand. To enumerate such vast quantities, science must rely on its best estimates.

Quite recently, there has been a recalculation of the total number of stars (and their "star factory" galaxies) in the visible universe. The long-standing, previous estimate, made famous via Carl Sagan's book/PBS tv series Cosmos ("billions and billions"), was that there were approximately one hundred billion galaxies, each containing roughly one hundred billion stars. Some later estimates have suggested one trillion such galaxies.

However, it seems that these numbers are off by a few orders of magnitude. Previous estimates used spiral galaxies (such as our Milky Way, and the Andromeda galaxy) as the standard gauge for star counting. Yet, about one third of our universe's galaxies are not spiral types, but rather, egg-shaped types known as elliptical galaxies (note: there are other types too, but most are variations of these two kinds).
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New Light-absorbing Layer Makes Polymer Solar Cells More Efficient

Tiffany Kaiser
DailyTech
Fri, 03 Dec 2010 14:46 UTC
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© Leah Hansen/Iowa State UniversitySumit Chaudhary and Kanwar Singh Nalwa
Thin and uniform layer on textured substrates provides enhanced efficiency in polymer solar cells.

Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory researchers have improved the efficiency of polymer solar cells through the use of a new process that increases light absorption.

Lead researchers working on the study include Sumit Chaudhary, Iowa State assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; Kanwar Singh Nalwa, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering and student associate of the Ames Laboratory; Kai-Ming Ho, an Iowa State Professor of Physics and Astronomy and an Ames Laboratory faculty scientist, and Joong-Mok Park, an assistant scientist in the Ames Laboratory. Together, these researchers have created a new process that increases the efficiency of solar cells.

To do this, researchers took flexible, lightweight polymers and added a textured substrate pattern that provided a uniform and thin light-absorbing layer. Also, this textured substrate pattern remains uniformly thin when going up and down the flat-topped ridges, which are less than a millionth of a meter high.
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New Method Predicts Earthquakes With 80 Percent Accuracy

Cameron Scott
San Francisco Chronicle
Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:47 UTC
Predicting Earthquakes
© USGSSan Andreas fault.

A new Spanish study that analyzed local earthquake data since 1978 found patterns in the data that can predict a medium to large earthquakes with 80 percent accuracy.

The key factor was the fault's resistance: less resistance leads to lots of small earthquakes, whereas more resistance leads to scarcer but bigger quakes.

Fascinatingly, another recent study, this one out of Israel's Hebrew University, focused on the similar principle of friction. It found that the laws of physics long thought to determine friction don't really hold true: Rather than two blocks - used to simulate tectonic plates in the laboratory - touching at every point along their adjacent faces, there are actually a discrete set of points at which they touch, and the contact points don't all break at the same time.
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IBM Achieves Silicon Photonics

Stephen Shankland
News.Cnet.com
Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:56 UTC
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© IBMIBM's new processors integrate optical communication technology in a development called silicon photonics.
IBM has achieved a major milestone in making the dream of silicon photonics, in which computer chips send signals of light rather than electricity, into reality.

At the semiconductor industry conference Semicon in Tokyo today, IBM photonics leader Yurii Vlasov is detailing how IBM has created a chip that integrates many of the necessary elements of optical communication between a processor and other devices. Significantly, the design uses conventional rather than exotic chip manufacturing technology, involves very small components, and essentially permits a fiber-optic communication line to be attached directly to a processor.

And more significantly, it's headed for real-world use, a sign that IBM's work is serious. That initial use is in IBM's relatively exotic Exascale project to build a computer that can perform a quintillion mathematical calculations per second--roughly 1,000 times that of today's fastest supercomputers.

"In three to five years, silicon photonics will be the main enabler for that level of computation," said Solomon Assefa, an IBM research scientist and one of the members of the team that developed the chip. And in the years after that, it'll follow the traditional computing industry trend and spread to more ordinary products, he predicted.
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Autism MRI Test May Detect Disorder Quicker in High-Functioning Patients

Nicole Ostrow
Bloomberg.com
Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:40 UTC
Doctors diagnosed autism in children by using MRI to track brain circuit activity, according to research that suggests the method may help speed up detection and add to knowledge of the disorder's biological base.

In a study of 60 children, half with mild autism and half with no autism, researchers identified the condition 94 percent of the time using magnetic resonance imaging, according to a study online this week in the journal Autism Research. The scans helped show how information moves and is processed in the brain.
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False Memories Created When the Brain is Damaged

Sergiu Vidican
Metrolic
Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00 UTC
Brain Damage
© Metrolic
The scientists have discovered that some terrible illnesses such as Alzheimer's disorder are much worse than it was believed. Besides the capacity of erasing the memories, it seems that some of these illnesses have the capacity of creating new and false memories as well. These findings might prove to be beneficial for the people who suffer from these illnesses.

It seems that in their case a certain portion of the brain, called perirhinal cortex is affected. The perirhinal cortex is located in the middle of the brain, and it has the main task of forming memories. This part of the brain processes the information received, and it uses the information in order to turn it into a picture of an object. Lisa Saksida, who is a psychologist at the University of Cambridge in England, said that when one suffers from Alzheimer's disease, this portion of the brain will be the first one affected. Because of that, the person who suffers from the disease can no longer form these pictures of the objects in the brain, using very complex processes. Instead of using these complex processes, the brain will use very simple processes which in most of the cases are not as reliable. Because of that, the brain will try to make certain connections between memories. As it can not remember things very well, it will create false memories in order to make the connections.
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Like to Sleep Around? Blame Your Genes

Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience
Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:45 UTC
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© Unknown
Whether your roommate is Samantha Sleeps-Around or Paul the Prude, cut him or her some slack: People's predilections for promiscuity lie partially in their DNA, according to a new study.A particular version of a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4 is linked to people's tendency toward both infidelity and uncommitted one-night stands, the researchers reported Nov. 30 in the online open-access journal PloS One.

The same gene has already been linked to alcoholism and gambling addiction, as well as less destructive thrills like a love of horror films. One study linked the gene to an openness to new social situations, which in turn correlated with political liberalism. In the new study, researchers gathered a detailed history of sexual behavior and relationships from 181 young adults. They also collected DNA samples from the volunteers' cheeks and analyzed the samples for the presence of the thrill-seeking version of DRD4.

"What we found was that individuals with a certain variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to have a history of uncommitted sex, including one-night stands and acts of infidelity," study researcher Justin Garcia, a postdoctoral fellow at Binghamton University, State University of New York, said in a statement.
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