Physical Sciences
pontiff | December 5, 2008News from the other coast: MIT has won an IGERT to start an interdisciplinary graduate program in quantum information science. From the press release:
MIT has been awarded a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a pioneering doctoral-study program in the growing field of quantum information science (QIS), which has evolved rapidly recently with a new influx of ideas from quantum physics and poses great potential in supercomputing.
Website up an running here.
Isaac Chuang sends me some info on the program. Note for undergraduates: looks like a summer program is…
oracknows | December 4, 2008I've long had an interest in World War II history. Ever since I was around 11 or 12 years old, a major portion of my reading diet has consisted of books and articles about World War II. Back when I was young, my interest was, as you might expect, primarily the battles. The military history of World War II fascinated me, and I build many, many models of World War II fighter aircraft and warships when I was in my early teens. (No cracks about how the airplane glue obviously affected me, although it is true that back then it was real airplane glue, chock full of toluene and lots of other organic…
mspringer | November 26, 2008Ok, ok, I admit there's post-1900 classical that I really like. Copland and Gershwin in particular were mentioned by a number of people, and both are great. I made my first acquaintance with Copland when I was a little kid watching a NASA documentary, and in the background of some dramatic launch was his Fanfare for the Common Man. Gave me chills.
Now to the actual post:
I'm thankful for many, many things. One of them is having the next few days off from school. Now large parts of that time off are going to be spent studying, but that's not a bad deal considering there will also be…
apalazzo | November 22, 2008So here I am with half an hour to spare, I'll just spew out some thoughts from an incident that occurred a couple of days ago.
I was chatting with a science writer and unfurling my usual gripes about science journalism. Very few science writers are willing to tackle ideas originating out of biochemistry, molecular and cell biology. They would rather talk about 'omic research - you know "big biology" projects like the human genome project, ENCODE or the hap map. And when they write about subjects like genomic research, some journalist do a good job explaining the bare minimal basics (along…
j7uy5 | November 21, 2008There was a time when I was vacationing, near the Bosque del Apache
wildlife preserve. There were literally thousands of birds.
Most were snow geese or sandhill cranes. There were
a lot of people, too.
But off a ways, there was a trail. It went, among other
places, to a spot called Solitude Canyon. Sounded good.
Even better, there was an overlook. On a hill, high
above the bosque, it was possible to see the preserve. The
thousands of birds appeared as white and gray pixels, rendered on a
pointillistic expanse.
On the way back, I came to a point in the trail. There was a
post with a…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2008In a comment on another post, Alex gently reminds me that what counts as a leak from the science/technology/engineering/math pipeline depends on your point of view:
I don't think of you as a "leak." But I'm in an undergraduate physics department, so unlike the people in the Ph.D.-granting departments where I trained I'm not in the business of training people to go for science faculty jobs. I'm in the business of teaching people some science so they can go out and use their training to pursue whatever opportunities interest them. You study ethical and philosophical issues in science and…
mspringer | November 19, 2008#3 - James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell is my favorite physicist. This site takes its name from a wise thing he once said: "In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of obtaining data." For all the volumes written about the philosophy of science, that sums it up pretty well. Is it built on observable facts and empirical data? If so, it's science. Otherwise it's not. Anyone, however, can come up with a clever thing to say. Almost no one in history has come up with as many brilliant…
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2008
As I have argued before, there is a class of objects in the biological domain that do not derive from the theory of that domain, but which are in fact the special objects of the domain that call for a theoretical explanation. The example I have given is mountain, which is a phenomenal object of geology, and yet not required by the ontology of any geological theory, which does include overfolds, tectonic plates, upthrusts, the process of differential erosion, and so on. At the end of the theoretical explanation, the mountains have not disappeared so that we might now drive from Arizona to Los…
grrlscientist | November 14, 2008tags: neurobiology, neuroscience, animal communication, birdsong, premotor nucleus HVC, brain temperature, neural circuitry, motor behaviors, bioacoustics
Captive-bred Zebra Finch, Taeniopygia guttata, at
Bodelwyddan Castle Aviary, Denbighshire, Wales.
Image: Adrian Pingstone/Wikipedia [larger view].
Birdsong is the primary model system that helps scientists understand how the brain produces complex sequences of learned behavior, such as playing the piano. In songbirds, there are many interconnected brain regions that play specific and important role in the production of song. These…
revere | November 12, 2008Half of all restaurants in the United States are fast food restaurants. They do $100 billion worth of business a year (that's one seventh of a Bailout, a new unit of expenditure). A lot of the fast food is in the form of beef (hamburgers), chicken (sandwiches, tenders or nuggets) and french fries. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, familiarly known in the trade as "penis") uses stable isotope analysis to trace the input materials in three large fast food chains. The results can be summed up in one word -- corn:
We used carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes…
rallain | November 11, 2008One of the fundamental aspects of physics is the study of light and how that interacts with matter. I have been putting off this post - mainly because I am not a quantum mechanic (I am a classical mechanic). There are lots of things that could be done in this post, but I am going to try and keep it limited (and maybe come back to the interesting points later). Also, most of my posts are aimed at the intro-college level or advanced high school level. This will be a little higher. If you are in high school, there is still a lot of stuff for you here.
Let me summarize where I am going to…
goodmath | November 11, 2008 It's always amusing to wander over to the Discovery Institute's blogs, and see what kind of nonsense they're spouting today. So, today, as I'm feeling like steamed crap, I took a wander over. And what did I find? High grade, low-content rubbish from my old buddy, Casey Luskin. Luskin is, supposedly, a lawyer. He's not a scientist or a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination. There's nothing wrong with that in the abstract; the amount of time we have to learn during our lives is finite, and no one can possible know everything. For example, I don't know diddly-crap about law, American…
clock | November 8, 2008We are busy preparing for The Open Laboratory 2008. The submissions have been trickling in all year, and a little bit more frequently recently, but it is time now to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several - no problem. Or ask your readers to submit for you.
Then take a look at your favourite bloggers and pick some of their best posts - don't worry, we can deal with duplicate entries. Do not forget new and up-coming blogs - they may not know about the anthology - and submit their stuff as well.
As we did last…
evolvingthoughts | November 8, 2008
It has become common in recent years for people to use terms of philosophy in distinct contexts, as it has terms of biology. Thus, ontology has gone the way of taxonomy, being dragooned into service of database techniques, to mean something quite the opposite of what it originally meant. I have noticed this tendency of computer technology for decades, ever since I got hopelessly muddled when doing database programming in the early 80s until I realised that they were using some terminology of formal logic in exactly the wrong way (I forget what it was now). A database ontology is not an…
neurophilosophy | November 4, 2008The Men's Final of the 1981 Wimbledon Tennis Championships is one of the most memorable events in sporting history. John McEnroe, who was playing against Bjorn Borg, famously challenged one of the referee's calls by throwing a tantrum, during which he shouted the immortal line "You cannot be serious!"
McEnroe's outburst was controversial, and he was almost eliminated from the championship because of it. But he may have been right to challenge the referee after all: according to a new study published in Current Biology, in such close calls, professional tennis referees consistently misjudge…
clock | October 31, 2008We are busy preparing for The Open Laboratory 2008. The submissions have been trickling in all year, and a little bit more frequently recently, but it is time now to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several - no problem. Or ask your readers to submit for you.
Then take a look at your favourite bloggers and pick some of their best posts - don't worry, we can deal with duplicate entries. Do not forget new and up-coming blogs - they may not know about the anthology - and submit their stuff as well.
As we did last…
sb admin | October 30, 2008When those of us who practice real medicine write about implausible medical claims, we are often accused of lacking compassion, as if offering false hope is the same as compassion. We are also accused of turning away from therapies that "couldn't hurt". After all, if someone wants to use aromatherapy, what's the harm?
The truth is that improbable medical claims are dangerous, and not just for the obvious reasons (i.e. dangerous practices such as chelation therapy). They also turn people away from real therapy. I've previously introduced you to the concept that there is no such thing as "…
clock | October 30, 2008Programmable Genetic Clock Made Of Blinking Florescent Proteins Inside Bacteria Cells:
UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The clock's blink rate changes when the temperature, energy source or other environmental conditions change, a fact that could lead to new kinds of sensors that convey information about the environment through the blinking rate.
Real Robinson Crusoe: Evidence Of Alexander Selkirk's Desert Island Campsite:
Cast away on a desert…
drorzel | October 29, 2008Last week, I wrote about ion traps as a possible quantum computing platform, which are probably the best established of the candidate technologies. This week, I'll talk about something more speculative, but closer to my own areas of research: neutral atoms in optical lattices.
This is a newer area, which pretty much starts with a proposal in 1999. There are a bunch of different variants of the idea, and what follows will be pretty general.
What's the system? Optical lattices use the interaction between atoms and a standing wave of light to produce a periodic array of wells in which individual…
drorzel | October 23, 2008
Good Math, Bad Math : Credit Default Swaps: Gambling as Insurance
"Credit default swaps are interesting - in the same way that a Rube Goldberg device is interesting. They are in a fundamental sense very simple, but the structure that's built up around them is so bizarre, so ridiculous on the face of it, that when you look at it in retrospect, it's hard to believe that anyone actually thought that it was a good idea, or that it could ever work."
(tags: economics math stupid)
Spin segregation puzzles physicists - physicsworld.com
"John Thomas and colleagues at Duke University found that…