milhayser | January 27, 2012On Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Sandra Porter imagines the fallout of HR 3699, a bill that would eliminate the requirement for free public access to NIH-funded research papers. Porter writes, "The reasoning behind this requirement is that taxpayers funded everything about the research except for the final publication, and so they have already paid for access." In small schools and community colleges without costly journal subscriptions, passage of this bill would effectively remove contemporary scientific literature from the classroom. Porter continues, "working in science, and…
milhayser | January 24, 2012What's better than an answer to a question? More questions, perhaps? ScienceBloggers have been very quizzical the last few days, beginning with Jason Rosenhouse on EvolutionBlog. After co-authoring Taking Sudoku Seriously with Laura Taalman, Rosenhouse wondered if 17 is really the minimum number of clues needed to solve a Sudoku puzzle. Although no one has ever generated a workable 16-clue puzzle, proof has been out of reach—until now?
On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel considers the possibilities when a supernova remnant has nothing to show at its center. It could be the result of two…
milhayser | January 20, 2012
On the USA Science and Engineering Festival blog, founder Larry Bock addresses the "declining number of young Americans entering the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)." The Festival expo will take place April 28th and 29th, aiming to "inspire the next generation of science and technology innovators through exciting unforgettable ways." Bock says that waning student interest in STEM subjects is not "a problem for our schools to tackle alone. It will take all of us—from involved parents and teachers to employers, government entities, STEM professionals and…
milhayser | January 13, 2012
When the stars align, the results can be nothing short of spectacular. On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel shows us an "Einstein ring" photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. This celestial halo surrounds a massive red galaxy, and is in fact light from a much more distant galaxy focused by gravity. Ethan explains, "gravity will bend spacetime, forcing light into a curved path. If a very distant galaxy is properly lined-up with us and a less distant—but very massive—galaxy, its light will not only be bent into a ring if the alignment is perfect, but its light will be greatly magnified…
milhayser | January 12, 2012
The Higgs Boson, an elementary particle thought to give mass to all other particles, remains an elusive final piece of the Standard Model of physics. On The Weizmann Wave, Professor Eilam Gross writes "many scientists believe that the Standard Model will stand or fall on the discovery of Higgs boson particles or proof that they don't exist." Titanic efforts at the Large Hadron Collider over the last year have been geared toward observing the Higgs, but despite suggestive data released on Tuesday, the indisputable remains out of reach. Kostas Nikolopoulos writes on Brookhaven Bits &…
milhayser | January 11, 2012Renewable energy sources could allow for a prudent decrease in CO2 emissions while still powering a populous, electrified global economy. On The Pump Handle, Mark Pendergrast examines the proverbial canary in the coal mine, Japan. Wary of imported fossil fuels and burned by nuclear disaster, Japan is looking toward solar, geothermal, wind, water, and biomass-powered alternative energy sources. Wind, for example, could provide 10% of Japan's energy needs, but with blade-busting typhoons and fierce winter lightning storms, turbines must be more robust and adaptable than ever. Mark writes, "…
milhayser | January 10, 2012
Not one to let physical and economic reality get in the way of a good one-liner, Newt Gingrich recently remarked that the United States could "open up enough oil fields in the next year that the price of oil worldwide would collapse." But as Sharon Astyk reports on Casaubon's Book, it can take years to develop such resources. And, as demonstrated by the hurdles that have tripped up the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, getting far-flung crude to the right refineries can be a logistical nightmare. Sharon says that most of the interred oil "won't be economically viable to extract or move," and…
milhayser | January 6, 2012
After announcing in September that they had detected neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, OPERA researchers immediately set out to replicate their results. On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel says they reconfigured the neutrino beam, which originally fired 10,000-nanosecond pulses, "to produce much, much shorter pulses—less than 10ns. And while they've only been running this way for a few weeks, they've already got 20 neutrino detections from the shorter pulses, and they see exactly the same timing anomaly." This confirmation rules out problems with the original experimental…
milhayser | January 3, 2012
On Greg Laden's Blog, we learn that "a subspecies of 'Black Rhino' also known as the 'browsing rhino'" has gone extinct in Africa, while Northern White Rhinos and Javan Rhinos have likely met the same fate. Dr. Dolittle says the last known Javan rhinoceros in Vietnam was found "with its horn cut off, most likely a victim of poachers. Another subspecies, The Indian Javan rhino (R. sondaicus inermis), is believed to have gone extinct in the early 20th century." Fifty individuals still linger in West Java, and thousands of White Rhinos still roam in Africa, but on the whole this family is…
milhayser | December 23, 2011
On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel counts down to—what else?—Isaac Newton's birthday. Opening a link on this advent calendar yields not a chocolate, but an equation and an important piece of the physics puzzle. For December 19th, we come to "one of the most revolutionary moment in the history of physics," Max Planck's "formula for the spectrum of the 'black-body' radiation emitted by a hot object at temperature T." Chad writes that Planck's initial mathematical trick became "the opening shot of the quantum mechanical revolution that completely changed physics." For the 18th, Chad delves…
milhayser | December 19, 2011
On The Pump Handle, Liz Borkowski examines the ethical dilemma of testing the anthrax vaccine in children. If a widespread attack were to occur, we would want to know the safety and efficacy of the vaccine beforehand. But is an attack likely enough to warrant testing the vaccine on children? On ERV, Abbie Smith explains how vaccines are made: "Sometimes we use dead viruses. Sometimes we use crippled viruses. Sometimes we dont need to use whole viruses at all—little chunks of the virus are fine. Sometimes we just need chunks of the virus, but we keep them dressed up in hollow membranes."…
milhayser | December 15, 2011
On Tomorrow's Table, Pamela Ronald shares a breakthrough in the study of bacterial communication. Although bacteria have been known to use a limited chemical vocabulary, for the first time they have been observed to use a protein as a signalling mechanism. Ronald writes, "Ax21 is a small protein. It is made inside the bacterial cell, processed to generate a shorter signal and then secreted outside the bacterium." In the species studied, perception of Ax21 caused nearly 500 genes—ten percent of the bacterium's genome—to change expression. Thus galvanized, individual bacteria assemble into…
milhayser | December 13, 2011
Like addicts, we would love to stick to what is easy, familiar, and dependable. The withering consequences of our actions, abstracted to an intangible future, are easy to deny. Prominent politicians say that global warming is a fantasy, that we can keep doing what we're doing, that everything will be okay. Meanwhile their speech is paid for by the same corporations we enrich with our emissions. These corporations are addicted to our money like we to their energy and plastic, but corporations are not people, and unlike us, will never have the will to quit. Recently a number of groups…
milhayser | December 6, 2011On The USA Science and Engineering Festival, Joe Schwarcz writes that in the media's "drive to capture public attention, science sometimes takes a back seat." He offers an accurate headline for one study: "Large daily dose of blueberry powder may reduce the growth of a rare type of artificially induced breast cancer in a special variety of immune suppressed mouse." But only claims made relevant to the individual will sell newspapers—not to mention cereals and snack bars cooked up with the latest isolate. More than money, exaggerated headlines can cost us a false sense of hope. But we…
milhayser | December 5, 2011
On Pharyngula, PZ Myers tries to imagine an ancient squid, preying on reptilian whales and arranging their vertebrae as a testament to its glory. He writes "I love the idea of ancient giant cephalopods creating art and us finding the works now. But then, reality sinks in: that's a genuinely, flamboyantly extravagant claim, and the evidence better be really, really solid. And it's not." The claim comes from a fossil site in Nevada, where a cluster of ichthyosaur remains have long been thought to come from "an accidental stranding or from a toxic plankton bloom." But paleontologist Mark…
milhayser | November 21, 2011Recipients of the 2011 Nobel Prizes were announced the week of October 3. The winners in medicine were honored for their work in immunology, as reported on Tomorrow's Table. Steinman "discovered a new class of cell, known as dendritic cells, which are key activators of the adaptive immune system;" shockingly, he died a few days before the announcement. On We Beasties, Kevin Bonham questions the significance of Beutler's contribution, saying "the conceptual groundwork for its importance in the immune response had already been laid" by a researcher named Janeway. Kevin continues, "giving…
milhayser | October 31, 2011On Class M, James Hrynyshyn reports a counter-intuitive survey conclusion: people who are more educated about science are less likely to be worried about climate change. The study posits that views on climate change are "cultural" and not purely scientific, making people want to "fit in" to a skeptical mainstream. But James writes, "Surely embracing reality, regardless of the opinions of your peers, is more rational that rejecting it?" Meanwhile Orac impersonates the anti-scientific sentiments of the Republican party on Respectful Insolence, writing "Anthropogenic global warming? Nope!…
milhayser | October 17, 2011
Last month, a team of researchers announced that their neutrinos appeared to be travelling faster than the speed of light. Ethan Siegel explains that the mass of a neutrino is "less than one-millionth the mass of the electron, but still not equal to zero" and "should move at a speed indistinguishable from the speed of light." Meanwhile the OPERA team had to smash 1020 protons just to detect 16,000 neutrinos—and account for every source of delay an uncertainty in their experimental setup. On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel explains that the researchers used GPS satellites to measure the…
milhayser | October 13, 2011
Meteorology still depends on a bit of clairvoyance, but in the 19th century many sailors, fishermen, and farmers "had to rely on storm glass, an inexpensive and profoundly inaccurate divining tool." The mixture of "camphor crystals, potassium nitrate, ammonium chloride, water and alcohol" transitions from "solid to crystalline under circumstances that still aren't full understood." Frank Swain has details and pictures on SciencePunk, along with an account of the origin of forecasting in the British Isles. On Class M, James Hrynyshyn considers the complicated effects of clouds on world…
milhayser | October 12, 2011
On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk asks if we can stomach a new kind of cuisine— in case, you know, a massive volcanic eruption wipes out all our staple grains. Instead of wheat, corn and rice, "we probably would begin getting comfortable with acorn pancakes and turnip stew with taro dumplings." But Sharon says that even barring catastrophe, "something *is* happening, something disastrous. The wheat is being grown often on dry prairie soils that should never be plowed at all. The corn and soybeans are being grown continuously in the midwest at a high cost to both topsoil and the ability of…