Science & TechnologyS


Pocket Knife

Water, water everywhere, but not a soul to think

Cameron Martin
JustGetThere
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:54 UTC


dean kamen
©Unknown
Dean Kamen and the Slingshot

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge, 1798

The talking points of this, my second sojourn into writing what will be a monthly editorial piece for this fledgling new column, Chorus of Change, are twofold. First, I would like to acquaint those of you whom are unaware with Dean Kamen's newest invention: the Slingshot; and how it's potential for global good is beyond anything I've seen in my lifetime. Secondly, I am taking this opportunity to voice my frustration with how difficult it has been to come by this information: what Kamen and his team have managed to accomplish in the conception and realization of this glorious contraption.
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Light Saber

Impugning the Integrity of Medical Science: The Adverse Effects of Industry Influence

Catherine D. DeAngelis, MD, MPH; Phil B. Fontanarosa, MD, MBA
The Journal of the American Medical Association
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:46 UTC
The profession of medicine, in every aspect - clinical, education, and research - has been inundated with profound influence from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. This has occurred because physicians have allowed it to happen, and it is time to stop.
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Evil Rays

Using mind control to make flies sing

Roger Highfield
The Telegraph
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:03 UTC
An Oxford scientist has used mind control to make female flies belt out male love songs, revealing they have a hidden capacity for masculine behaviour.

The research, which suggests that the sexes are not quite so different as they seem, exploits a remote control method that could provide revolutionary insights into behaviour.
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Hourglass

Flashback 3 theories that might blow up the Big Bang

Adam Frank
Discoverer
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:47 UTC
Time may not have a beginning - and it might not exist at all.

For Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, the Big Bang ended on a summer day in 1999 in Cambridge, England. Sitting together at a conference they had organized, called "A School on Connecting Fundamental Physics and Cosmology", the two physicists suddenly hit on the same idea. Maybe science was finally ready to tackle the mystery of what made the Big Bang go bang. And if so, then maybe science could also address one of the deepest questions of all: What came before the Big Bang?

Steinhardt and Turok - working closely with a few like-minded colleagues - have now developed these insights into a thorough alternative to the prevailing, Genesis-like view of cosmology. According to the Big Bang theory, the whole universe emerged during a single moment some 13.7 billion years ago. In the competing theory, our universe generates and regenerates itself in an endless cycle of creation. The latest version of the cyclic model even matches key pieces of observational evidence supporting the older view.

This is the most detailed challenge yet to the 40-year-old orthodoxy of the Big Bang. Some researchers go further and envision a type of infinite time that plays out not just in this universe but in a multiverse - a multitude of universes, each with its own laws of physics and its own life story. Still others seek to revise the very idea of time, rendering the concept of a "beginning" meaningless.
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Telescope

Apophis risk not increased: science fair judges, world media screw up big time

Daniel Fischer
Cosmic Mirror
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:05 UTC
First the story appeared on April 4 in Germany's 'leading' tabloid ("I have calculated the end of the world ... and NASA says, I'm right"), later in more serious papers ("Nico and the end of the world") - and today, thanks apparently to an AFP story where the writer hadn't found it necessary to check anything, it has taken off around the world. Alas: it's absolute nonsense! The claim is that a 13-year old German schoolboy "discovered" - while working on an entry for a major German science competition - that the 2036 impact probability of asteroid Apophis is not 1:45,000 as the NASA calculation says but actually 100 times higher. Because during the 2029 approach the asteroid would hit a geostationary satellite and be deflected into a much more dangerous orbit. The newspapers also claimed that this boy not only was awarded several prizes for his paper but that NASA had "conceded" that he got it right and they were wrong. We're all doomed, right?
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Laptop

Most computer users repeat passwords, at their peril

Jordan Robertson
Associated Press
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:14 UTC
Using the same password for multiple Web pages is the Internet-era equivalent of having the same key for your home, car and bank safe-deposit box.

Even though a universal password is like gold for cyber crooks because they can use it to steal all of a person's sensitive data at once, nearly half the Internet users queried in a new survey said they use just one password for all their online accounts.
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Telescope

Stellar Birth in the Galactic Wilderness


Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:19 UTC
A new image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows baby stars sprouting in the backwoods of a galaxy -- a relatively desolate region of space more than 100,000 light-years from the galaxy's bustling center.

The striking image, a composite of ultraviolet data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and radio data from the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array in New Mexico, shows the Southern Pinwheel galaxy, also known simply as M83.
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Bell

Planetery Protection: Governments reconsider the risk of Near-Earth asteroid and comet impacts

Lee Billings
Seed Magazine
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:38 UTC
Until very recently, the devastating 1908 explosion of a space rock over the isolated Tunguska region of Siberia was thought to be a once-in-a-millennium event. Based on comparisons to nuclear weapon blast effects, many experts estimated the Tunguska object to be 50 to 100 meters. But new simulations by Mark Boslough at Sandia National Laboratories suggest the Tunguska object was much smaller than previously believed. And since smaller near-Earth objects (NEOs) are more common than larger ones, the implication is that the gap between such impacts may be centuries rather than millennia.
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Question

Nein! German schoolboy's NASA correction refuted


Scientific American
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:38 UTC
Late yesterday, it seemed that a calculation in a report that a German boy submitted to a science fair was about to shame the processing power of the mighty NASA. But, alas, a new article in London's Guardian says the kid has potential, but, in this case, was, well, wrong.
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Butterfly

Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory, dead at 90

Maggie Fox
newsdaily.com
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:31 UTC
WASHINGTON - Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, who showed how small actions could lead to major changes in what became known as the "butterfly effect," died of cancer on Wednesday at the age of 90, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said.

Lorenz, a meteorologist, figured out in the 1960s that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere could set off enormous changes. In 1972 he presented a study entitled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

Born in 1917 in West Hartford, Connecticut, Lorenz earned degrees in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1938, from Harvard University in 1940, and degrees in meteorology from MIT in 1943 and 1948.
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