Science

Looking Over the Edge

~ Cheryl

Via the excellent Peggy I discover that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’s journal, IEEE Spectrum, has a special issue on the Singularity, including a contribution from Vernor Vinge. I haven’t had a chance to read much of it yet, but there does seem to be a fair amount of debunking going on in addition to the wild-eyed fantasizing. I also note in passing that the word “singularity” is becoming seriously devalued.

Cold Fusion Back from the Dead?

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

While I was never entirely convinced by the idea of cold fusion, I knew Martin Fleischmann quite well when I was at college and he didn’t strike me as the sort of person who would just make stuff up. I figured that there had to be something going on, and that one day someone would find out what it was. So I’m rather interested in this report in which a leading Japanese physicist claims to have done his own cold fusion experiment and got a result. What’s more he performed the experiment with an audience of 60 scientists and journalists. I’m still not convinced that we have actual fusion happening here, but I’ll be very interested to see what comes of attempts to reproduce the experiment.

Thanks to Zemanta, here are some other reports of the experiment: Gizmodo, EnGadget (although both seem to have got the story from Slashdot, so they probably add nothing new, and half of you have probably seen it already).

Cory on Statistics

~ Cheryl

Our Mr. Doctorow has an article in today’s Guardian. It is all about the difficulty that we humans have in understanding statistics. I think he’s rather brave to try to make any point by talking about pedophiles, but he is right, and he does show very clearly why anti-terrorist efforts end up fingering so many innocent people.

Of course I’m not by any means the target of his article. My reaction on entering Las Vegas airport (you don’t need to leave it, Cory, there are plenty of slots inside the terminal) was to think, “oh my, look at all these poor sods pouring away their life’s savings.” The best way to learn that gambling is a poor investment is to work in the business (in my case working in a bookmaker’s during college vacations). I’m also one of those odd people who generally feel safer on public transit than in a car.

And that actually brings me to a useful point, because actually it isn’t so much lack of education that makes us bad at understanding risk, it is the way things are presented, and the way we react to them. People think that traveling on trains is horribly dangerous because every time there is a train crash it is headline news. If every car crash was headline news as well, then people might start getting the point that they miss from the raw statistics. But even then I suspect they’d dismiss the danger of road travel on the grounds that they are good drivers and it is only bad drivers who have accidents, whereas on a train you don’t get to drive. We are hard-wired to be much more fearful of things we think we cannot control than of things we think we can. Which is why gambling addicts spend so much time convincing themselves that they have “a system.”

Platypus Sex

~ Cheryl

Many of you will have seen the news reports last week about the amazing new discovery that the duck-billed platypus has not two (like humans) but ten sex chromosomes. So human females are XX and human males are XY (and yes, some people do get born with XXY) but a platypus is what, ABCDEFGHIJ?

Well, I was too busy to follow it up at the time, but now I’m starting to, and like most science stories in the media this not really something new. The platypus has five pairs of sex chromosomes (sort of XXXXXYYYYY). Its close relative, the echidna, has something very similar. Here, for example, is a paper from 2007 on the subject. Clearly the prospects for intersex monotremes are enormous, though as with humans such developments are very rare. What really interested me, however, was finding out that birds have an entirely different system of sex chromosomes to mammals. Birds, apparently, are either ZZ or ZW. Nature, as usual, is far more weird and wonderful that most people are aware.

And just to prove how weird and wonderful it is, here is Jennifer Ouellette on why a platypus isn’t a chimera but some humans are.

God, QED

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This week’s Economist has a long article about a European science project designed to investigate the mechanisms and worth of religion. The project aims to look at how religious thought might manifest in the brain, and whether religious behavior has any evolutionary benefit. There does appear to be a reasonable amount of evidence that belief in God makes people behave in a more socially responsible manner. The article also notes:

Dr Wilson himself has studied the relationship between social insecurity and religious fervour, and discovered that, regardless of the religion in question, it is the least secure societies that tend to be most fundamentalist.

Which suggests that the best way of combating fundamentalism might be to make the people who are prone to fundie views better off.

Sadly the scientists are no further forward in solving the age-old dilemma of determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Monkey Talk

~ Cheryl

Today’s Independent has a fascinating story about language use amongst a troupe of putty-nosed monkeys in Nigeria. This is the gist of it:

Male putty-nosed monkeys are able to combine different types of alarm calls to indicate their identity, what they have seen and whether they intend to flee – and all of this information is recognised by other members of the troop, a study has found.

That’s impressively sophisticated.

A Happy Ending

~ Cheryl

It is always nice to hear that a small press publisher that was in trouble has managed to get back on its feet. Dedalus is a British small press that publishes a lot of work in translation and in particular has produced a series of fantasy anthologies from various countries. These include books edited by excellent people such as Brian Stableford and Johanna Sinisalo. Had I know that they were in trouble, I would have been encouraging you to go out and buy their books.

But, as I said, the story has a happy ending. Although the £25,000 annual grant that they were receiving from Arts Council England is to end, they will be receiving a similar sum in sponsorship from a subsidiary of the Routledge publishing group. More details via The Guardian.

A number of things interest me about this. Firstly I’m slightly boggled that £25,000 could make a difference between survival and bankruptcy for a small press. That shows you just how tight things are in publishing. Secondly, the money from Routledge is a sponsorship, not a buy in. Dedalus will be entirely free to carry on their business without interference. And finally, we have come to a pretty poor pass when someone who is no longer dependent on a government arts grant can say with relief:

It also means we don’t have to spend time on masses of paperwork and political games with an organisation that wants us to fail.

Then again, we are talking about the same government that is talking about closing Jodrell Bank. I guess they need more money to sustain all those military adventures abroad.

The Black Hole of St. Andrews

~ Cheryl

No, not a student residence. Nor the place that your golf balls disappear when you make a bad drive. It is an analog of a black hole, made from light. I quote: “pulses of light travelling down an optical fibre can be made to affect other light waves in much the same way as a black hole does.” Apparently these things even have their own version of Hawking radiation.

Nature has a lot more on this piece of physics fabulousness.

Reading Your Mind

~ Cheryl

We are not yet at the point of being able to scan people’s brains and tell what they are thinking, but what can now be done is pretty impressive. This story is about research done at UC Berkeley. The scientists first calibrated their computer by showing their two test subjects 1750 pictures of different types of object, and recording the brain activity associated with each picture. The computer also scanned the pictures and was told which scan related to which picture. They then showed the subjects and the computer 120 different pictures of the same types of objects, and asked the computer to predict, based on the brain scans and its own scans of the pictures, which object was being viewed. With one subject the computer was right 72% of the time, with the other 92% of the time. That’s impressive.

Update: The rest of the Internet is catching up with my news. 🙂

Here are Nature and The Independent

Aliens Stole My Spaceship?

~ Cheryl

Suppose you were to read this:

The speed and direction of some spacecraft are being mysteriously altered as they pass near the Earth.

Would you assume it was from some nutty UFOlogy web site? Well you would be wrong. That’s scientists from JPL talking to Nature. The differences in trajectory are very small, but they seem to happen with every spacecraft that is monitored. Either there’s a problem with NASA’s model, or there’s something about physics that we don’t quite understand.

Ultimate Time Sink?

~ Cheryl

If you have an hour or two to spare, and you are bored with reading blogs or watching YouTube, why not have a bit of Phun? You might learn some physics along the way too. It looks to be an absolute must if you have kids. For all I know it might even be a useful test bed for writing hard SF.

Getting On Board Quickly

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

There is an interesting article in today’s Guardian about a nuclear physicist who has developed an algorithm for getting passengers on board planes quickly. Essentially it is a “windows first” system, but with the added tweaks that you board from the front and you do all odd rows followed by all even rows. It might work. What little the article explains about the math seems sensible. But then again you have to enforce it. I can’t speak for all airlines, but it is rare that a United gate agent will be brave enough to enforce their boarding by seating area system when faced by an aggressive passenger who wants to be on the plane NOW!