“In my dreams it couldn’t go as perfectly as it went tonight, we went right down the middle.” Touchdown: NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, soon to look for water in the Martian Arctic, lands without incident in the Vastitas Borealis plains. Congrats!
Tag: Science
The Ground Beneath Our Feet.
“California has more than a 99% chance of having a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake within the next 30 years, according scientists using a new model to determine the probability of big quakes. The likelihood of a major quake of magnitude 7.5 or greater in the next 30 years is 46% — and such a quake is most likely to occur in the southern half of the state.” Memo to myself, re: the job hunt: Perhaps avoiding Southern California is in order…
Childhood’s End.
World in My Eyes.
“Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death. I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself.” The shape of things to come? Scientists at Berkeley conceive a way to use MRI imaging to “map” images in the brain. “Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in time…It is possible that decoding brain activity could have serious ethical and privacy implications downstream in, say, the 30 to 50-year time frame.”
No ship that small has a cloaking device…
“‘It’s very deep, like in a forest on the darkest night,’ said Shawn-Yu Lin, a scientist who helped create the material at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. ‘Nothing comes back to you. It’s very, very, very dark.‘” Dick Cheney’s soul? Tonight’s lunar eclipse? No, a great leap forward in “transformational optics”…and invisibility cloaks. The “paper-thin material…absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made — about 30 times as dark as the government’s current standard for blackest black.”
Distant Mirrors.
“‘This is a landmark discovery because it implies that solar system analogs may be very common, at least scaled-down versions,’ said Sara Seager, an extra-solar planet expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ‘…We are on an inexorable path to finding other Earths.‘” Astronomers find a solar system not unlike our own 5,000 light years away. “We are seeing the emergence of a new planet-finding technique — one that opens up an entirely new capability for planet finding. It is more powerful than we ever thought possible.”
Babel Bark.
Blah Blah Blah Berkeley…Scientists in Hungary have apparently developed a computer program that speaks basic canine. “After analyzing digital versions of the barks, overall the computer program correctly identified the kinds of barks the dogs made 43 percent of the time — about the same as humans’ 40 percent…The software identified ‘walk’ and ‘ball’ barks better than people, although people identified ‘play’ and ‘alone’ barks better than the software.“
Hmm. I don’t want to dismiss the advance of science, but that’s a pretty low success rate. (And I’d wager most dog owners can get the thread of their own pet’s barking more often than 40% of the time.) More interestingly, though, “‘I’m pretty sure this could work with any animal vocal signals,’ Molnár told LiveScience” So, when the Dolphin Wars start, you’ll know why.
Which reminds me, longtime readers may remember that Berk and I were part of the test group for the American release of the Bowlingual. Alas, that version of this technology wasn’t really ready for primetime.
My God, It’s Full of Brains.
“It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.“
In today’s NYT, Dennis Overbye attempts to explain the Boltzmann Brain problem, a theoretical puzzle causing consternation among cosmologists. “‘It is part of a much bigger set of questions about how to think about probabilities in an infinite universe in which everything that can occur, does occur, infinitely many times,’ said Leonard Susskind of Stanford, a co-author of a paper in 2002 that helped set off the debate. Or as Andrei Linde, another Stanford theorist given to colorful language, loosely characterized the possibility of a replica of your own brain forming out in space sometime, ‘How do you compute the probability to be reincarnated to the probability of being born?’”
Um, yeah. The graphic sorta helps explain what may be going on: Minute fluctuations in the universe’s general move towards entropy create random pockets of order, some of which could hypothetically organize as floating brains, or pocket universes or whales and flowerpots too, I suppose. Or something like that…Now my brain hurts.
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.
“We have to realize that we are already living in a society where we are already self-medicating with caffeine.” This one’s been languishing in the bookmarks for awhile, but via Drudge and blog-twin FmH, scientists may have discovered a cure for sleep deprivation in Orexin A. “The study, published in the Dec. 26 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys’ cognitive abilities but made their brains look ‘awake’ in PET scans. Siegel said that orexin A is unique in that it only had an impact on sleepy monkeys, not alert ones, and that it is ‘specific in reversing the effects of sleepiness’ without other impacts on the brain.” But is it cheaper than my daily Red Bull?
Operating, Generating, New Life.
“‘This raises a range of big questions about what nature is and what it could be…Evolutionary processes are no longer seen as sacred or inviolable. People in labs are figuring them out so they can improve upon them for different purposes.’” A front-page story in today’s WP announces we’re on the threshold of completely synthetic life — as in 2008 — made from enhanced or even artificial DNA. “Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core ‘operating system’ for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology…In the past year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been flooded with aggressive synthetic-biology claims.“