NPR’s OnPoint delves into the current trend of “age management.” Legit or quackery?
That’s 2 unrelated shutdown incidents. According to Anders Sandberg, we have to experience 30 unrelated technical failures before we can chalk up the failure of the LHC to anthropic selection. 2 down, 28 to go.
Experiencing this makes me a bit uneasy. To be so clearly aware of the error of perception is sobering and makes me wonder what else I perceive incorrectly… or not at all.
This video came to me via the Neurophilosophy blog, who wonders about perceiving effects before their cause.
Charles Stross wonders how likely an alien reconnaissance mission would be to find our Earth a potential and hospitable settling place:
We are finely tuned survival machines that have evolved to survive in a niche on one particular planet in one particular epoch. Even our own planet is unimaginably hostile to our kind of life for most of its history.
WIRED:
Dangerous debris near rocket launches could be tracked in real time by combining tricks from particle colliders, moon landings and vulture tracking, a new study finds.
I find it sad and frustrating that rather than figure out a way to clear out all this junk, we’re building systems to help us avoid it.
By Ben Fry, an illustration for SEED Magazine:
Sequences of human DNA aligned with about a dozen other mammals, created as an illustration for Seed Magazine. The data is from the Mammalian Genome Project at theBroad Institute. This is real alignment data, based on a more “functional” tool that browses this data… In each block, the top (white) row is human DNA, additional rows are ordered roughly in their “evolutionary distance” from humans. First row after human is chimp, then rhesus macaque (rhesus monkey), elephant, dog, armadillo, cavia (basically a guinea pig), cow, and so on, down to monodelphis (opossum). Letters are colored when they differ from human, with Ts and As in red, Cs and Gs in blue.
This is a some incredible footage from the laboratory of Doris Taylor, a medical researcher working on revitalizing organs using stem cells. In this video, you’ll see a pig’s liver and hear that were removed from a cadaver and then washed (using basic soap) to remove the dead cells. Taylor’s lab team eventually discovered that they could get a dead, washed heart to restart, using stem cell therapy. The systems and machines that her lab has built to wash and rebuilt hearts are amazing!
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I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.
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Airships may be the key component in a new robotic system for exploring the celestial bodies most likely to harbor life like Mars and Jupiter’s moon, Titan.
My favorite in the list:
What is reality really?
The material world may, at some level, lie beyond comprehension, but Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna, is profoundly hopeful that physicists have merely scratched the surface of something much bigger. Zeilinger specialises in quantum experiments that demonstrate the apparent influence of observers in the shaping of reality. “Maybe the real breakthrough will come when we start to realise the connections between reality, knowledge and our actions,” he says. The concept is mind-bending, but it is well established in practice. Zeilinger and others have shown that particles that are widely separated can somehow have quantum states that are linked, so that observing one affects the outcome of the other. No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched.
From Technology Review, an image tour of how we’ve seen the brain over time (the above image from the 19th century):
Over the 100-year history of modern neuroscience, the way we think about the brain has evolved with the sophistication of the techniques available to study it. Improvements in microscope design and manufacture, together with the development of cell-staining techniques, afforded neuroscientists their first glimpse at the specialized cells that make up the nervous system. Microscopes with more magnifying power enabled them to probe nerve cells in greater detail, revealing distinct compartments. Newer techniques expose the connections between nerve cells, revealing the complex organization of the brain.
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Scientists love to group things. We also like to name things. We also like to plot data on bivariate graphs. On really crazy nights, we let our hair down, well not me per se but other scientists with hair, and do all three. 90% of science is grouping, naming, and plotting.
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The Long Now Foundation: Invasion of the Nanobees!
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