General
sciencepunk | June 28, 2011Following on from last week's discovery of water that can freeze at room temperature, here's another trick. Water at minus 130 degrees Celsius can flow like a thick fluid. The work carried out by Ove Andersson, a physicist at Umeå University, showed that by increasing pressure to 10,000 times the norm, ice could be coaxed into a viscous liquid state 30% denser than normal water. The findings lend support to the theory that water has two liquid phases, one at much higher density than the other. I'd imagine it also means liquid water is likely to exist even on frozen planets.
As someone…
illconsidered | June 26, 2011Let's see if we can avoid letting the last post completely derail. This thread is open for any topic, but started specifically for responses to Neil.
sciencepunk | June 23, 2011From the Journal of Things Kurt Vonnegut Warned Us About, Japanese scientists have discovered a way to make water freeze at room temperature.
Image CC Nicholas Bufford
The team of scientists were investigating the properties of water molecules wrapped in single-atom thick carbon nanotubes. The nanoconfined water displayed several unusual properties. Most striking was that as the width of the carbon nanotube decreased, the melting point of the water trapped inside rose. These "tubule ices" are unlike any seen in bulk water, and can even occur at room temperatures.
Thankfully, there's no…
sciencepunk | June 21, 2011Extremophiles are superhardy microbes that can live in some of the toughest environments Mother Nature provides - from the frozen wastes of the Antarctic to highly-acidic mine tailings. Now you can add your kitchen to that list.
A paper published in the journal Fungal Biology details the discovery of a novel type of fungus found living on the rubber seals of dishwashers. Zalar et al. sampled 189 machines in over a hundred towns and cities across the world. A plethora of fungal species were recovered, including some harmful to human health.
We all know this is how it ends.
Fungi such…
sciencepunk | June 21, 2011Important news from the University of Washington: allowing bacteria to play rock paper scissors teaches them the value of restraint.
Image CC Mike Souza
Researchers created a group of E. coli bacteria locked in a non-transitive game of survival. Non-transitive refers to situations where each player is weak against another in the field, such as rock-paper-scissors. One type of bacteria produced two antibiotics, the remaining bacteria were either resistant to the antibiotics, or sensitive to them. All three types were dropped into 192 wells, between which they could migrate.
On occasion…
sciencepunk | June 13, 2011So the other week there was collective quivering over the internet at the news that a Chinese teenager had sold his kidney to pay for an iPad 2. I say quivering, because It was an immediate viral hit, a perfect combination of the pre-eminent SEO-friendly technology, body horror, stupid-teens-making-dumb-decisions-for-latest-must-have-item narrative and a conveniently obscure provenance, as if the story had been precisely manufactured by the same Shenzhen factories that Apple uses to make its gadgets.
And so, the world rolled its eyes and tutted at the foolishness of youth and decried Steve…
sciencepunk | June 1, 2011Sometimes you wake up and you think of a really good idea and then after a couple of hours trying to find out how QR patterns are encoded you remember to Google your idea and find someone's already done it.
But I don't mind. Check out this sweet QR code clock by QR Planet.
In case you're wondering, a QR code is simply a two-dimensional barcode. It's a way of packing a lot of machine-readable data into a small space. QR patterns can encode URLs, text, phone numbers, and contact details. You can scan them with your cameraphone if you have the right software - there's plenty of free…
illconsidered | May 31, 2011Watch for more of this kind of stuff as green prducts and technologies grow! And along the same vein, did anyone else note that Saudia Arabia brought up the idea of their being entitled to compensation for lost revenue in any kind of a global oil consumption control agreement? I think this came up at Copenhagen. Is there an Arabic word for "chutzpah"?
Unedited press realease below:
Chico, California - The ChicoBag Company, a reusable bag company, has announced it is the sole defendant in a lawsuit filed by Hilex Poly Company, LLC, Superbag Operating, LTD., and Advance Polybag, Inc.; three of…
illconsidered | May 9, 2011Forced climate change causes global warming as a response, not the other way around.
We all focus on globally and seasonally averaged mean temperature, and though it is a very coarse measure, there are some justifiable reasons. But as a general focus for those concerned about the human influence on our planetary life support system, is it right?
Michael Tobis has a great essay on why it really isn't. If the sentence above doesn't quite get the point across, from the same paragraph:
It takes a hell of a kick to move global temperature as much as we are moving it, and the climate system is…
illconsidered | March 17, 2011I am off traveling again so the posting will be quiet for a while and the comments unattended for a couple of days. So be nice and don't forget three or more links lands you in the "unapproved" queue.
Before I go, I thought I would share the YouTube below that came to my attention via a "friend" request. I am a big fan of Climate Crocks and a couple of other climate YouTubers but this is quite different. It is thin on science but very energetic, young and slick, I can't help but think it is a very good approach because after all, we are in a PR battle not a scientifc one.
What do people…
sciencepunk | March 17, 2011In the course of making my Radio 4 doc on mind controlling parasites, I visited Professor Jaroslav Flegr at his lab in Prague. Flegr came to prominence after demonstrating that drivers involved in car accidents were far more likely than the general population to be infected with toxoplasma gondii, a parasite known to interfere with risk perception and reflexes in rats.
In a small attic office, we chatted about the university and its funding compared to the larger, better-funded parasitology labs in the UK and beyond. Over endless cups of black tea, Flegr told us that the relatively meagre…
sciencepunk | February 16, 2011Very pleased to discover that after much uncertainty, the Royal Society Science Prize for Books has returned after securing a sponsor. They're currently seeking submissions for this year's award:
Entries for the 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, the world's leading science books prize, are being accepted from today 16 February 2011. The 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books will celebrate the best of 2010's new popular science writing for a general adult readership. The Prize is open to science books written for a non-specialist audience. The winner will receive…
sciencepunk | February 2, 2011Two post-graduate students from Moscow State University were rescued on Tuesday after the ice floe they were sampling broke off and drifted out to sea. The pair had been measuring the thickness of the sheet ice covering the White Sea when the incident occurred.
The unnamed student is rescued from the ice floe
Part of a team of twelve students and two teachers from the Faculty of Geography on a short expedition to Pertominsk, a remote area in the far northwestern edge of Russia. The man and woman were separated from the rest of the group around 4pm, when strong winds caused a 12 by 16m…
sciencepunk | December 30, 2010I'm sure Google Ngrams needs no introduction, but in case I'm wrong: it's a nifty (if crude and much-misused) tool for investigating the frequency of written terms in Google's vast databank of digitised books - some trillion or so words.
As I was editing my forthcoming zombies book, I fiddled about with Google NGrams to visualise the emergence of certain technologies (such as the sharp rise and fall of galvanism).
One of the central questions in my book is the notion of death, and how it is better understood as a process than a state - i.e. whether you are 'dead' or not depends largely on…
illconsidered | December 15, 2010Okay, we really need a topic change around here and I have about 40,000 (or is it 40??) tabs open in Firefox waiting to spark a conversation. Some are months old news now, somewhat more than stale. That gives you all an indication of the gap between my intentions and my performance these days....I have an hour before my travels back to Czech Republic begin, and I will be out of contact for a couple of days, I think the time is now.
So, lets just do a bit of a topic dump and see what catches on.
India is building a wall along its border with Bangledesh. I wonder how people who consider the…
illconsidered | November 30, 2010Although I just play the role of a scientist on the internet, my father actually is one. As well as being a medical doctor, he is a retired professor of biophysics. I am telling you this because he has recently co-authored a book on a subject that might interest readers of ScienceBlogs: fluoridation of human water supplies. The book is entitled "The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There" and you can read a detailed review of that book here [PDF].
At my request, he has written up a guest post…
illconsidered | November 23, 2010Shorter Lost final scene: "yeah, okay, we never knew WTF was going on either, but thanks for watching!"
sciencepunk | November 17, 2010Hurrah, I'm in New Scientist, writing about some very clever bacteria:
The appeal of sudoku has spread to the prokaryotic world. A strain of Escherichia coli bacteria can now solve the logic puzzles - with some help from a group of students at the University of Tokyo, Japan."Because sudoku has simple rules, we felt that maybe bacteria could solve it for us, as long as we designed a circuit for them to follow," says team leader Ryo Taniuchi.
Read the full text at New Scientist