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Simulating a Supernova
The trillions of points of data needed to model the explosion of a star would take three years just to download, and scientists are maxing out computer processing applying this data in simulations. Using parallel processing and more efficient organization of data, researchers have modeled a supernova in unprecedented detail.
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God on the Brain
NPR has compiled their five part series on god in the brain into a nice flash presentation. Lot’s of thought-provoking material here.
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A Flight Simulator for Flies
To learn how a bow fly is able to perform the aerial acrobatics and precision maneuvers required to avoid our fly swatters, researchers have created a flight simulator for flies where they can plug electrodes into the fly’s brain and see how it responds to different stimuli.
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Diane Fossey VS the Driver Ants
The late Dian Fossey describes digging for gorilla bones and waking up to find the gravesite overrun with driver ants, which swarm like a river devouring all in their path.
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Searching for Amelia Earhart’s DNA
Researchers at the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery are looking for DNA evidence to prove that Amelia Earhart landed on Nikumaroro Island and was stranded there, eventually perishing.
Amelia Earhart
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Computer Images of Prehistoric Spiders
Taking 3,000 X-rays of fossils between 359-299 million years old reveals 3-D images of ancient spiders, which did not spin silk, but did have diverse evolutionary adaptations by which we may infer what life was like for them.
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Mickey Mouse Evolved for Our Love
Micky Mouse’s evolution from his early appearance to a softer, more cuddly and juvenile appearance was the same adaptive measure young mammals use to appeal to adults.
The 50-year evolution of Mickey Mouse provides another example of neoteny, as the famous Disney character-through such changes as larger relative head size and larger eyes-becomes increasingly juvenile in appearance. Credit: Life Nature Library & Smithsonian Books |
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Vanishing Head Illusion Disproves Creationism
One of the favorite arguments of Creationists is that evolution couldn’t have produced complex structures like the human eye. In fact, we have a very good understanding of how eyes evolved, from light-detecting cells in photosynthesizing microbes that allowed them to follow the sun, to concentrations of these cells to more accurately detect light sources, to increasingly deepening indentations of these cells to focus shadows and see prey or predators, to bulbs capable of focusing light into clear images.
In fact, the eye has evolved several times in many different branches of the evolutionary tree. Human eyes are somewhat problematic though, because they evolved with the optic nerve on top of the cells receiving the light. It’s like having a camera with the wiring between the lens and the film. Animals on other branches on the evolutionary tree don’t have this defect, such as squid. If a creator designed the human eye, as Julia Sweeney said, then that creator gets an “F”.
This defect in our eyes does provide some fun, as our brains must hallucinate the missing visual information into our blind spots. This makes us prone to the Vanishing Head Illusion (Best viewed in fullscreen (HT Kristina)), which you can see below:
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Swarming Red Crabs on Christmas Island
Every year, red crabs migrate in huge herds across Christmas Island to spawn, walking a kilometre a day, while they cannot walk for more than five minutes normally. Now scientists have found the crabs are driven by the release of a hormone that produces a sugar-rush in the animals, giving them the energy for their journey.
~red+crabs+migration.JPG/$file/red+crabs+migration.JPG "Red crab Migration on Christmas Island")
Red crab Migration on Christmas Island
Courtesy of Australian Government Attorney-General’s Department
The migrations are stunning in their scope, as are the swarms of baby crabs that soon follow:
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Amphibians Mating by the Full Moon
Tonight, when the next full moon comes out, think about the fact that researchers have discovered the world’s amphibians are in synchronized mating. You might even try impressing your date with this information!
Credit: minipixel, Everything is Permuted, budak, nutmeg66, |
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Sweat Allows Us to Withstand Boiling Temperatures
This animation by Lev Yilmaz about a Colonial-era experiment to see how much heat a human can withstand demonstrates how incredibly effective sweating is:
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America Saves 2.3 Quadrillion BTU’s of Energy in 2008
USA! USA! Energy use in America dropped 2.3 quadrillion BTU’s in 2008 from 2007, with the biggest drops in the industrial and transportation sectors, increases in commercial and residential use, increases in wind and nuclear power, and more than 50 percent of the energy consumed was lost as waste heat or other inefficient consumption.
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The UN is Prepared for Extraterrestrials
The United Nations has an Office for Outer Space Affairs, which will be responsible for arranging a meeting between the UN Secretary General and any extraterrestrials who may show up on Earth… they also do plenty of more important work, but I figured the aliens thing would get you to click the link.
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Thomas Jefferson, Uber Geek
Enjoy Wired Magazine’s photo-tour of Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, where he tried to bring science gadgets into every aspect of his life.
Credit: afagen |
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Sea Snakes Need Freshwater Too
Sea snakes evolved from land to the sea, which means the ocean is like a desert to them, and they must find freshwater to hydrate. The article also delves into the adaptations other species use to eliminate excess salt from their bodies.
Credit: Alex Halavais |
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Doctors Support Health Care Reform
Symbol for the Medical Sciences
Health Care is a science issue. Beyond the higher-purposes of discovery and enlightenment, science provides daily improvements to our quality of life through improved agriculture, technological conveniences, and a better understanding of our place in the Cosmos. A large part of this endeavor is the enhancing and extending our quality of life through the medical sciences, but in America the system is barring many of us from enjoying the fruits of the medical profession’s labors.
America has the highest per capita health care costs of any other industrialized nation, spending 44 percent more on health care than the nation with the second highest costs, Switzerland. Yet, we get fewer physician visits and shorter hospital stays on average compared to most other industrialized nations. 40 million Americans are without insurance, meaning they are one bout of pneumonia away from financial ruin.
The Health Insurance Company practice of rescission, where the companies do not audit the veracity of customer applications until the customer gets sick and needs treatment, at which point they look for any little discrepancy between the policy-holder’s application and their health history to deny them coverage, means there are millions more Americans who think they are covered, but are in for a horrible surprise someday. In one extreme case, a woman was denied breast cancer surgery because she failed to disclose that she had been treated for acne. The federal government refuses to regulate such underhanded, crooked behavior on the part of insurance companies, which means that individuals who have been paying into their health insurance plan for 20 years have a 10 percent chance of being rejected for coverage when they finally need it.
Most of us don’t know this because most of us have employer-sponsored group plans. But thanks to the Information Age, more and more of us are going the self-employed route. I was an independent contractor in Washington DC from 1998 to 2001, responsible for my own health insurance. Juggling that $250 a month bill with my rent, electricity, gas, and lack of steady income was a perpetual stress factor in my life. At the same time, the libertarian news magazine The Economist argues that failing to tax employer-sponsored health care plans has artificially inflated the market in America. In other words, one of the reasons we pay so much for health care in America is because tax-exempt health-policies have made health care cheaper than it should be for those of us lucky enough to be in a company large enough to offer it.
What about that 10% of people insurance companies deny treatments to for failing to understand the cryptic language used on the applications, which even health insurance executives admit they have no idea what they are talking about? We pay for them. Hospitals are required to treat the sick whether they can pay or not, which is why people aren’t dying in the streets currently for lack of coverage. Hospitals recoup this loss by increasing the prices of their services to consumers.
Not only are Americans paying for the health care of people who cannot afford it, at the same time we are subsidizing the health insurance companies that refused to pay for them. Think about that in the context of health insurance companies experiencing a 1,084 percent increase in profits between 2002 and 2006. That’s not socialism; that’s a concept so financially ludicrous as to defy rationality.
But even without all these economic manipulations and diabolical practices, insurance alone is socialism. In a health insurance system, everybody pays for everyone else’s illnesses. The only difference is that we have a for-profit company managing the whole thing instead of the government.
The American Medical Association endorses the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. They do not think the plan to reform health care is perfect, but they understand that the current system is spiraling down into an increasingly worsening state that cannot be supported. When doctors give health advice, wise people listen to them.
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Planet Jupiter, Guardian of the Earth
Last Moonday, an amateur astronomer spotted an Earth-sized hole in Jupiter’s atmosphere, possibly caused by a comet impact.
Jupiter Impact
Credit: NASA
With the newly upgraded Hubble telescope, NASA was able to get some high-resolution photos of the black clouds rotating around the planet’s atmosphere. They look amazingly like the last time we witnessed such an event happen to this planet larger than all the other planets combined. Just fifteen years ago, the Hubble telescope got to watch in real time comet Shoemaker Levy break up and crash into Jupiter over the course of a week, leaving a series of similar-looking bruises.
It’s speculated that one of the requirements for life in a solar system is the presence of a gas-giant planet like Jupiter, which has 318 times the mass of Earth, to sweep the neighborhood clean of debris; otherwise, planets like ours would regularly get wiped out by errant meteors and comets, preventing life from ever evolving here.
Once again, Earth is thankful to this planet named for the Roman king of the gods for keeping our cosmic neighborhood clean and relatively peaceful.
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Appreciating the Apollo Guidance Computer
The hardware storing the programs on the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) was called LOL Memory, where LOL stood for “Little Old Lady” in honor of the women with knitting skills who had to sew the copper threads into the hardware to represent the ones and zeroes of the programming neccessary to guide the lander to the Moon’s surface. Unfortunately, After all that software testing and painstaking construction, the AGC got overloaded with data and erroneously returned an alarm on the descent.
AGC emulator
You can hear the MP3 of the astronauts recieving the error here.
You can also download an AGC emulator for your desktop here. It’s interesting to see that the developers have to run the software on an enhanced Palm Pilot, since a more basic model can’t handle the software.
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Buzz Aldrin is a Character
Armstrong may have been the first to step on the Moon, but Aldrin was the first to pee, which he did as he was making his historic climb down the ladder to the lunar surface.
Buzz Aldrin is Peeing in this Photo
While Armstrong and Collins avoid the public eye, Aldrin appears to have no problem with celebrity he interviews, sings, and punches paparazi out with glee.
Making of Buzz Aldrin’s Rocket Experience w/ Snoop Dogg and Talib Kweli
Buzz Aldrin on the Ali G Show
Buzz Aldrin Punches Bart Sibrel Out for Calling Him “a coward”
Buzz Aldrin’s Rocket Experience
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Apollo 11 40th Anniversary Yay!
Happy 40th Anniversary of the Apollo Lunar Landing, check out the official NASA website for the event, which includes Google Moon links, flickr galleries, mission audio, and restored videos of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk.
Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean holds a special environmental sample container filled with lunar soil Credit: NASA
This is also a good time to remind everyone that the quote should be, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Without that one little word, the quote doesn’t make any sense, and software analysis indicates the word was in there, even if 1960s technology prevented us from hearing it.
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Sarah Palin’s Cap and Trade Hypocrisy
Sarah Palin’s Washington Post column The ‘Cap And Tax’ Dead End argues that taxing the oil industry for carbon emissions will bring economic disaster. Instead, we should emulate her state:
In Alaska, we are progressing on the largest private-sector energy project in history. Our 3,000-mile natural gas pipeline will transport hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of our clean natural gas to hungry markets across America. We can safely drill for U.S. oil offshore and in a tiny, 2,000-acre corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if ever given the go-ahead by Washington bureaucrats.
The hypocrisy of Palin’s column is that her own state of Alaska profits from a system based on the same principle as cap and trade. Alaskan residents each receive $2,000 a year in return for letting the oil industry have its way with their natural resources. Governor Palin even instituted a windfall tax on oil companies, which the state government turned into an additional $1,200 check to each Alaskan to help them cope with gas prices. What does it say about Palin’s character that she is able to criticize Americans for demanding compensation for the environmental consequences brought on by corporations, while demanding the exact same compensation for her own constituents?
Also revealing, is Sarah Palin’s stance on Cap and Trade during the 2008 presidential election, when she wholly supported it:
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