Discover, November 22 2010.
Our favorite autotuned scientists are back at it, with the seventh video in the “Symphony of Science” series. This video focuses on scientific/skeptical thought, explains creator John Boswell:
It is intended to promote scientific reasoning and skepticism in the face of growing amounts of pseudoscientific pursuits, such as Astrology and Homeopathy, and also to promote the scientific worldview as equally enlightening as religion. Read More >
Discover, November 22 2010.
To mark the 20th anniversary of his “Kryptos” sculpture, and its lingering mystery, sculptor Jim Sanborn has released a clue to deciphering the message engraved on the statue.
“Our work is about discovery — discovering secrets,” said Toni Hiley, director of the C.I.A. Museum. “And this sculpture is full of them, and it still hasn’t given up the last of its secrets.”
In 1999 three of the sculpture’s four sections were confirmed solved by computer scientist and amateur code-breaker James Gillogly. They contain historical references and cryptic sayings. Twenty years later, the remaining section, 97 characters long, is still unsolved. Read More >
Discover, November 19 2010.
What monkey mothers eat has a large impact on how skittish their offspring act in stressful situations like stranger danger–or the presence of a Mr. Potato Head in their cage. According to researchers, even normal monkeys find the toy’s large eyes to be “mildly stressful.”
But baby monkeys from mothers who were fed a high-fat diet (over 35 percent of calories from fat, modeled after a typical American diet) had a much stronger reaction to an encounter with the spud man, and also spazzed in the presence of an unknown human. The study, presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference, found that in stressful situations, the female offspring were more anxious and the males more aggressive. Read More >
Discover, November 19 2010.
PEAK CHOCOLATE
Chocoholics, be afraid. Be very afraid. Peak chocolate is coming.
Soon, humanity’s appetite for chocolate will increase to the point where there just isn’t enough chocolate in the world to sustain it. Researchers and chocolatiers the world over are predicting a chocolate peak within 20 years, John Mason, of the Nature Conservation Research Council told The Independent:
“In 20 years chocolate will be like caviar. It will become so rare and so expensive that the average Joe just won’t be able to afford it.” Read More >
Discover, November 19 2010.
A new camera being developed at MIT has the ability to see around corners–without the use of periscopes or mirrors. The camera works by bouncing ultra-short bursts of laser light off a solid surface (like a floor or an open door). Most of the light is reflected back to the camera, but some scatters in every direction, a small portion of which then hits and bounces off the object to be visualized (and other parts of the scene). Some of that scattered light then bounces back off the door or floor, and finally make its way back to the camera.
“It’s like having x-ray vision without the x-rays,” said Professor Ramesh Raskar, head of the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab and one of the team behind the system. “But we’re going around the problem rather than going through it.” Read More >
Discover, November 18 2010.
Rovers that roll are so 2004. This year’s designers are bringing the heat with fashionable Mars hopper designs, dreaming of explorers that can go the distance one half-mile hop at a time. The British team that described its design in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A isn’t the first to suggest a hopper. But unlike previous designs, this hopper wouldn’t rely on solar power for fuel, but would instead by powered by radioactive isotopes and the plentiful carbon dioxide in Mars’s atmosphere.
The ability to hop from place to place would enable the new explorers to cover more of the Martian landscape, and visit rough terrain that earlier rovers couldn’t handle. The 2004 rover Opportunity is just hitting 15 miles of surface driving after almost seven years on Mars. Read More >
Discover, November 18 2010.
Since we’re experimenting with using human excrement to power all kinds of things on earth, from buses and cars to natural gas for our homes, why not try renewable poop power in space? That’s the mission adopted by a team at the Florida Institute of Technology–they hope to bring the flexibility and sustainability of poop power to space. As a first step towards that goal, they’re testing the ability of a special hydrogen-creating bacteria, called Shewanella MR-1, to live aboard a UN satellite, says Fast Company:
The goal is, to put it bluntly, to see if Shewanella can convert astronaut feces into hydrogen for use in onboard fuel cells. “The bacteria generates hydrogen. If we give waste to bacteria, it converts to hydrogen that could be used in a fuel cell. We’re looking at how reliable the bacteria are,” explains Donald Platt, the Program Director for the Space Sciences and Space Systems Program at the Florida Institute of Technology. Read More >
Discover, November 17 2010.
We all heard about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But what if scientists could have actually HEARD it? In the wake of the disaster, several scientists are working to develop new ways to spot and monitor spills over time using sonar–by propagating sonic waves through the water and bouncing them off oil droplets.
Some of this research is being done by Thomas Weber and will be presented today at the Pan-American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics. Sonar is useful because it can monitor large and deep swaths of the ocean, and could reduce the need to take individual samples or to visually track oil on the water’s surface. Weber and his team were the first to try using this technology to visualize the oil, going out on several trips to the site. Read More >
Discover, November 17 2010.
The particle physicists at the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider aren’t just searching for the elemental forces of the universe; they are also looking for a #1 Christmas single. Several groups of physicists-turned-musicians from ATLAS are gearing up for the release of their first tracks under the “Neutralino Records” label.
The label is named after the hypothetical particle, the neutralino, which is predicted by supersymmetry and might even make up the universe’s dark matter. Executive producer (and physicist) Christopher Thomas told Discoblog that the music club at CERN, the organization that runs the LHC, is pretty active, but the ATLAS group was motivated to make an album to “show there’s another side to physicists. And maybe a bit of ‘hey, look what I can do!'” Read More >
Discover, November 16 2010.
The coyote to the right was caught on video running loose in the middle of Chicago at 3:00 am on Monday morning. The police didn’t seem to know what it was doing there, but Brad Block, a supervisor for the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control told Chicago Breaking News that the coyote is let loose in the city to monitor the pest population:
The animal has the run of the Loop to help deal with rats and mice. He said no one has called today to complain. “He’s not a threat…. He’s not going to pick up your children,” Block said. “His job is to deal with all of the nuisance problems, like mice, rats and rabbits.” Read More >