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Looking for something more productive than surfing youtube to fill your spare internet time? How about categorising galaxies in deep field photos.
Apparently machines aren’t that good at differentiating, and so they’re asking for volunteers to help them…
Here are the recent cool things in science I’ve been reading about.
Firstly
By a round-about process I found myself reading about the concept of stellar engines. This involves harnessing the energy output of a star (ie, our sun) to do something. There were the predictable options of using megastructures (such as Dyson Spheres) to collect the solar energy output and use it to power industry or power a giant computer, but the really really cool option I had not run into before was a thing called a Shkadov thruster, which uses an enormous mirror to actually move the star (and it’s gravitationally associated solar system) in a chosen direction. Sure it would be slow, but the idea of moving a star around… now that would be cool!
Second
The previously mentioned “round-about process” actually began at an article by Freeman Dyson (who is himself a pretty interesting fellow) about his predictions for Our Biotech future. At one point he makes the following observation of the similarity between the current state of Biotech and the early days of computing:
The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight.
With the unspoken assertion that as the Biotech technology improves and becomes more accessable to everyday people it too will loose the stigma it currently has and become an accepted everyday things like modern personal computing.
In what either has to be a spectacular revelation, or the mother of all from-the-grave practical jokes, a guy who worked at the Roswell Army Air Field, signed an affidafit stating that he saw the famous flying saucer and its alien crew, and had the statement released following his death.
I’m going with practical joke, but cool either way.
When you’ve gotten tired of microwaving flies, apparently it’s possibly (with an industrially modified super microwave) to convert plastics back to hydrocarbon gases and oils. I can’t imagine that it’s an energy viable way of making petrol, but perhaps if you linked it up to a massive solar power plant…
As a little science aside, apparently Dolphins from different areas have different “accents”, which is to say that their vocabulary of clicks and squeaks vary from group to group.
A british minerologist has discovered Kryptonite in a Serbian mine…
A couple of cool science things I’ve seen recently:
First comes an article about using genetic engineering to modify the photo-receptors in mice to allow them to see in three colours instead of the usual two (with appropriate experiments to allow them to test that they can actually distinguish the added colours). The article also has a bit on something else kinda cool, which is looking for women who, because of an x-linked mutation, end up with 4 kinds of colour photoreceptors instead of the usual 3, and as such can distinguish significantly more colours.
Next comes a group who claim to have developed a way to use enzymes to remove the A and B bloodgroup antigens from the surface of blood cells, turning all blood into group O. Now this is useful because O group blood can be given to patients with any blood group (for a moment we’ll ignore the -ve and +ve blood groups, which are much less of a problem) and so may help manage our shortages of blood for transfusions.
Penultimately is a thing on BBC about the possibility of planets forming in binary star systems (ie with two suns). Apparently it’s possible, and would sure make for some pretty sunsets – they keep on referring to the one in star wars, although I think the one in Pitch black is much more impressive.
And finally comes something today about how they think they have spotted the (rather large) openings for caves on the surface of mars.
In what surely has to be one of the more amusing lab “accidents” a researched may have accidentally stumbled onto a cure for a number of different kinds of cancer.
She was working with cancerous epithelial cells while researching treatments for inflammatory bowel disease when she made a mistake and added too much of one of her test drugs.
Afterwards she found that all the cancer cells had died. Initially she was irritated at her mistake ruining her experiment until one of her co-workers pointed out that perhaps “it killed all my cancer cells” was actually a cause for excitement.
So we’ll have to wait and see if it makes it to clinical trials, but it’s a pretty cool story.
Something that I have seen popping up in a couple of places now is some research out of Canada purporting to show a cure for diabetes (albeit in an animal model).
It almost sounds too good to be true: Inject a drug into the mice and have their diabetes disappear overnight, and some of the mice remained “cured” for more than 4 months with a single injection.
Normally I would be rather skeptical about this kind of thing, given that it blatantly flies in the face of the current understanding of how diabetes works, but it looks as though they’ve done their homework, and the work is also being published in the Journal Cell, which is probably one of the most prestigious biological journals around.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see if it translates into human clinical trials…
I stumbled upon a number of cool sciency stories this afternoon, and thought I’d package them together to pass them along.
The first relates to New Zealand and the long held belief that New Zealand had never been home to a native land based mammal, until they were introduced first by the polynesians (who bought rats and dogs) and the europeans (who bought just about everything else). There were bats, and seals, but nothing land based. Now fossils have been found which suggest that NZ was once home to a small native mouse sized mammal, which lived about 16 million years ago – Better get your history and biology books out kids and cross out that particular paragraph…
Secondly, earlier this week a telescope in New Mexico caught some damn cool footage of a shock wave spreading out across the surface of the sun. The technical name for the phenomenon is a Moreton wave, however for popular consumption the press releases all referred to it as a solar tsunami. Either way the picture is pretty cool.
Next was an article on slashdot relating to some research on how smell worked. The traditionally proposed model for how it worked was one smell molecule fits one receptor. The new research however was proposing that the receptors worked through some system of quantum electron tunneling, so that it was the nature of the quantum interaction that triggered the receptor (and thus the sensation of the smell) and not the shape of the molecule (thus explaining the previous observation that differently shaped molecules can have the same smell).
