March 2008 - Posts
AFP - Getty Images file |
Are chimps capable of intentional foolery?
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Humans aren’t the only ones who have a knack for fooling others: Witness the
deceitful cuckoos and the
yellow-bellied lizards. But humans, and
perhaps chimpanzees as well, are the animal kingdom's consummate foolers. In fact, scientists say our capacity for deception and deceit may well be related to the size of our brains - and reflect an essential characteristic of higher-order thought.
Just in time for April Fools' Day, here's a look at the evolutionary roots of foolery, as well as the origins of the annual custom and history's best April Fools' jokes.
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AP |
These photos show the skyline of Sydney in Australia before and during Earth Hour
in 2007. On Saturday, about 200 cities around the world are due to take part.
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Lights are going dark for a round-the-world, voluntary rolling blackout at 8 p.m. local time Saturday. Earth Hour - which originated in Australia a year ago and is now going global, thanks to the World Wildlife Fund - focuses awareness on saving energy and doing something about climate change. But the turn to the dark side didn't just begin last year, and it's about much more than one consciousness-raising hour. Saturday night also marks the beginning of a whole week of activities aimed at making our skies darker for good.
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EIROforum / CERN |
A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron
Collider's ATLAS detector. Click on the image for a larger version.
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The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.
Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe's CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there's no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they're bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.
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NIST / Notre Dame |
A wind-tunnel test shows
the turbulent air flow
around a baseball.
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Was there ever a team sport better-suited for statistical modeling than baseball? The heart of the game involves one pitcher vs. one batter at a time, allowing for a dizzying array of individual statistics. The regular season, as well as the typical player's career, will generally last long enough to build up an encyclopedia's worth of those statistics.
No wonder so many statisticians and physicists love to theorize about the game's winning factors - and no wonder new statistics are being created on a regular basis.
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I'm on my way to Tennessee to
talk about science journalism at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and get a look at
Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Postings won't be as regular over the next few days, but I'll be back in the office on Friday.
Twentieth Century Fox |
Click for video: Watch a spooky
scene from the movie "Shutter."
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For more than a century, photographers have been capturing spooky stuff on film: semi-transparent figures standing in the cemetery, for example, or glowing clouds of "ectoplasm" above a seance table, or orbs floating in a forest, or arcs of light encircling someone's head.
Ghostly pictures play a key role in the plot for the horror flick "Shutter" - and the movie's producers are asking people to upload their own spirit photographs. Is there anything substantial behind the spookiness?
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Even as the X Prize Foundation kicks off its $10 million competition for super-efficient automobiles, it’s working on plenty more prizes to come. X Prize co-founder Peter Diamandis says he’s aiming for two new prizes every year, focusing on five fields.
Much has happened in the three and a half years since the foundation passed along its first $10 million check, to reward the winners of the Ansari X Prize for private-sector spaceflight.
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AFP - Getty Images |
Arthur C. Clarke
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Science-fiction great Arthur C. Clarke never made it to outer space - but his DNA did, as part of a suborbital flight staged last year from New Mexico. And the odyssey isn’t over yet. The capsule containing a sample of Clarke’s hair was recovered, and some of that hair could be sent to the moon sometime in the next few years on a Google Lunar X Prize flight. A little bit of it will be saved for an even longer trip, into deep space … and a kind of immortality.
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NASA / CXC / UVic. / CFHT |
Photo gallery: Click on
the image to learn how
scientists know dark
matter exists.
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If physicists are right, most of the matter in the universe is made up of exotic stuff you can't see, called dark matter.
Usually, people think of dark matter as existing only on the far edge of galaxies, posing such a deep, dark mystery that only the professionals can understand it. But that would be wrong on two counts: First, there's probably some dark matter zipping through you right now. Second, the mystery of dark matter is now explained in an education kit that has been designed for high-schoolers - and is freely available over the Web.
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Geckos use amazing sticky pads on their feet to walk on walls, but not even a gecko can stick to the wall all the time. Now scientists have analyzed high-speed video to figure out how the lizard, like a cat, always lands on its feet.
Unlike cats, geckos owe their landing prowess primarily to their tails - which can also keep them from falling in the first place.
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ESA |
What's behind the vortex on Venus? Astronomers have been studying the atmospheric swirl at the Venusian south pole for more than three decades, and the latest crop of imagery from the European Space Agency's Venus Express orbiter documents quick changes in what appears to be the eye of a 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer-wide) hurricane. But they still haven't figured out the exact mechanism behind the vortex.
The fresh view of Venus' giant swirlie is just one of the curiosities documented in this week's wave of interplanetary imagery - taking its place alongside fresh close-ups of a mysterious Saturnian moon and dark halos on the planet Mercury. Read on for more of the highlights:
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Exploratorium / Linden Labs |
A Second Life resident visits Pi-Henge, one of the Exploratorium's Pi Day exhibits.
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San Francisco's Exploratorium makes an irrationally big deal out of pi: For 20 years, geeks have gathered at the science museum to troop in circular processions, solve pesky puzzles, string beads and consume mass quantities of pie - all building to a peak on 3/14 at 1:59 p.m., when the time lines up to form the first six digits of the mysterious and marvelous number.
This year marks a nice round number for Pi Day, an observance honoring one of the least-round numbers in mathematics. You don't even have to be at the Exploratorium to savor the 20th-anniversary celebration. Online resources, ranging from Web sites to the virtual world known as Second Life, are serving up a substantial slice of the Pi Day experience.
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Allen Institute for Brain Science
This cross section of a mouse brain, based on data from the Allen Brain Atlas, shows where genes are "turned on." The blue color
shows all cells sampled. Red and green indicate cells where types of
gene expression are active. Click on the image for a bigger version.
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With the backing of a billionaire, researchers today launched a project that builds on their earlier atlas of the mouse brain and goes after a challenge 2,000 times bigger: a 3-D genetic map of the human brain. And that's not all: They're planning to produce a similar map of the mouse spinal cord, as well as another atlas showing how the mouse brain develops from the fetus to adulthood.
The multimillion-dollar effort could help researchers develop new treatments for maladies ranging from spinal cord injury to autism.
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Chengde Mao / Purdue |
DNA strands can be programmed to
create the scaffolding for complex 3-D
structures, as shown in this artwork.
Click on the image for a larger version.
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The DNA double-helix molecule serves not only as an excellent construction manual for life as we know it, but also as a pretty good construction material in its own right. Scientists can bend the twisty stuff into two-dimensional shapes, including a "happy face" design - but three-dimensional shapes are much trickier.
In this week's issue of the journal Nature, researchers describe how sticky bits of DNA can put themselves together like Lego blocks to build up hollow geometrical shapes - ranging from pyramids to soccer balls less than a micron wide.
These DNA structures aren't just for kicking around: In the future, they could be used to deliver drugs, build nano-machines ... or hold prize molecular catches.
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NBC News |
Click for video: How impossible
is teleportation? Physicist Michio
Kaku gives his perspective.
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Just how impossible are such science-fiction concepts as teleportation and invisibility? They're not that impossible, physicist Michio Kaku says in a new book titled "Physics of the Impossible." In fact, they're considered mere Class I impossibilities - and someday soon they may be off the impossible list altogether.
Now, if you're looking for a Class III impossibility, there are only a few things in Kaku's book that rise to that level. See if you agree with his assessment.
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For years, nanotechnology has held out the hope of molecular-scale contraptions that can manufacture custom-made drugs or revolutionize the way computer chips work.
Now researchers in Japan say they have taken a big step toward that nano goal by creating the first molecular machine that can do parallel processing.
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The Cassini orbiter is due to make its closest-ever approach to a celestial body next Wednesday, when it comes within 30 miles of the surface of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s myriad moons. Enceladus isn’t just any moon: It just happens to shoot up geysers of ice crystals, which may hint at the presence of liquid water (and perhaps even life) beneath the moon's frozen surface. Cassini will be “scraping” right through the heart of the plume, at an altitude high enough to escape damage - but low enough to take samples and find out whether life’s building blocks lurk in that alien sleet.
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A sea cucumber can activate its body armor in a matter of seconds, by secreting chemicals that stiffen its soft skin. Now researchers are adapting that trick to create plastics beefed up with nanomaterials that can switch from hard to soft, or vice versa, with the flick of a signal.
Writing in Friday's issue of the journal Science, the researchers say such plastics could eventually be used for future biomedical implants, such as brain electrodes or … well … whatever.
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Reuters file |
Will Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton face off on
science in April? We'll see.
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Prospects for a presidential debate focusing on science and technology next month are on the upswing, thanks in large part to the fact that the Democratic nomination is still in play. Debate organizers say all three major candidates – Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democrats as well as the GOP's presumptive nominee, John McCain – are thinking about attending the tentatively scheduled April 18 event.
Science Debate 2008 would be presented at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute at a key time, four days before the Pennsylvania primary. But will it actually take place? That depends on political calculations so complex they'd leave mathematicians scratching their heads.
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 Microsoft via AFP - Getty Images |
Microsoft's LucidTouch displays "pseudo-transparent"
fingers on a handheld computer screen. Sensors
keep track of your fingers on the back of the device.
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Once a year, Microsoft Research gives outsiders a glimpse of its high-tech frontiers: gizmos that transform your fingers into ghostly digits on the screen, or make you look like a Webcam celebrity ... viewers that let you unravel the inner workings of the cell, or explore the outer depths of the cosmos ... sensor networks that monitor how climate change affects glaciers in the Swiss Alps, or how the chemistry of life works at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Even though I work right on Microsoft's main campus, I'm usually counted as one of those outsiders - but today, I finally got my first glimpse at TechFest, a science fair geared for grown-ups.
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Are you more likely to spend a tax rebate ... or a tax bonus? If you were automatically signed up for a retirement plan, would you stick with it ... or opt out? If the government sent you a filled-in tax return, would you go with Uncle Sam's figures ... or would you insist on doing the calculations yourself? Such are the questions that arise when economic policy intersects with the rising trend of neuromarketing, the science of selling to your brain.
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