Well i guess that “working on” is a bit of an understatement, as they already have a working hand-held device capable of identifying various bacteria and fungi already in use at the international space station. They are however still working on getting it even better. You see, the current version can detect some bacteria, and a recent upgrade to it allows it to detect some fungus as well (which is good, as it can damage equipment). They are working on getting even more capabilities on it (detecting more types of bacteria), and hoping that the end-product will actually perform much like a medical tri-corder from Star Trek, capable of detecting what ails a crewman who has fallen ill and such. If you look at the picture to the left here, you can even see that it kind-of looks like a tri-corder (post-original series anyway).

Now don’t get me wrong, i don’t have anything against health/medicine or anything (in fact i rather enjoy my own), but if you’re trying to copy star trek you could’ve picked something cooler then a medical tri-corder. Be that as it may, more Star Trek inspired technology can never be bad, although I’m sure we’d all prefer the holo-suite for some depraved fun.

If you’re interested in reading the whole story, head over to NASA’s website.

Well, since noone objected to last weeks link spamming, i’ll give it a whirl again (plus it’s easier for my hung-over brain to write then a full-blown article). Like last week, it’s basically just websites/blogposts i came across throughout the week that weren’t really news, but still interesting. If you have suggestions for links, send them to kari@reducedmass.com and i’ll have a look, maybe i’ll include it next week. Enough chatter though, on to the links.

The radiation pseudo medical-science of the early 1900’s: This is by far my favorite link this week. It is an article discussing a pseudo medical-science from the early 1900’s that involved getting a good dose of radiation every day to stay healthy. Much like other crap such as homeopathy, there were never any real research done on this, it was just assumed to be natural and good. Very interesting and almost comical read.

Visual representation of some crazy equations: This may be too nerdy for many, but i thought it was interesting still. It’s basically some guy that has apparently plotted a variety of functions with fancy colors and all. He’s also got a pretty fancy of a simulation of a galaxy. I honestly don’t know many of the equations he’s playing with, but if nothing else, it’s pretty psychadelic.

Clearing up electricity misconceptions from school-books: Now i’ll admit i didn’t read the entire website, but i think it’s a good subject and fairly easy to navigate to find something that you may have been taught wrong. The basic premise is that most books taught at the elementary school level are teaching things that are wrong, and this website aims to clear up some of the misconceptions that may have been born from this. If nothing else i’d suggest scrolling through the front-page reading the table of contents, you can see pretty quickly what the misconception being discussed in each chapter is, and decide if it is something you need/want to read or not. Some of the stuff is pretty pedantic really, but still interesting.

Ok, so there are some press-releases popping up now from the University of Washington, about a new video game that is making some bold claims (or at least has some bold goals), their have made a video game where us mere mortals are allowed to contort proteins into 3D shapes in hopes of creating something that is of actual use (link to game website).

The game is based on the actual physics of proteins, and the hope is that gamers around the world will embrace it and gain a sixth sense of sorts to building proteins in a good way, in fact, David Baker, one of the biochemists working on the project, says that his 13 year old son is better at the in-game protein bending then he is. So i guess they’re hoping that kids will gain an intuitive understanding of the physics involved and contort the proteins accordingly, utilizing the natural 3D puzzle solving skills that we humans have.

You might think that it’d be easier to just have a computer have a go at brute-forcing it’s way through it (try every permutation and see what works best), well they’ve already tried that and the number of different proteins needed to be tested are ridiculous, according to the article, it would still take centuries to solve even if all the computers in the world worked on it. So this is why they are trying to come up with an innovative way of finding new breakthroughs in medical science.

I tried downloading the game and playing it, and it was fairly easy to get started and work through the introduction part that explains to you the basic tools at your disposal (even worked fine with wine on my Linux computer). I do have serious doubts about the hefty amount of buzzwords used in their press-release though, take for example this line from one of the scientists:

Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize.

Plus of course the mention of perhaps curing HIV with it. This is obviously just shrewd PR work, as it is something that makes for quite catchy titles (”Will the next noble prize winner be a 12 year old gamer?”, “Will gaming nerds cure HIV?” etc), but it almost always seems that science press-releases with too many buzz-words are too good to be true.

I really wish i knew more about biology/chemistry so I’d be more qualified to comment on this whole thing (being a physicist myself), as i DO find it to be a very interesting idea, regardless of my distaste for their PR campaign. They claim that very soon they will be holding competitions for people to make proteins that might be of actual use in the medical industry and such, where the top proteins in the competition will actually be produced and tested in petri dishes at Dr. Bakers lab (and given credit if they publish an article on it).

I’m curious though, how they actually intend on picking winners out of possibly thousands of protein structures submitted, as they don’t know beforehand exactly what protein will solve whatever problem it is they have at hand, but that might just be skepticism from someone that does not grasp this field well enough.

Scientists from the University of Konstanz and the National Institute of Standards (NIST) have succeeded in producing a very powerful laser that also produces short pulses at very high speeds (press release here). While this may sound like something that doesn’t really concern us a whole lot (aren’t lasers for DVD players?) it turns out that this could actually have a big impact on finding earth-like planets in orbit of other stars.

To start with let me wow you with some numbers, the laser can produce 40 billion pulses per second and each one of those lasts only 40 femtoseconds, with the average power being 650milliWatts. Those may all be very impressive numbers (and trust me, they are), but let me tell you why this is something to be excited about aside from being the equivalent of porn for engineers. Well it turns out that lasers with these properties, can be used as so-called frequency comb’s, which is more or-less a measuring stick of sorts for light. You can think of this one as having a lot more notches on it and can therefore differentiate between much finer frequencies than it’s predecessors. For a great article on frequency combs, check out an article on NIST’s website, although long, it is not riddled with math and tries to explain it in a way so everyone can follow.

Now i said before that this could help with finding planets, and if you are a regular reader of ReducedMass.com, this may not surprise you. One of the most successful methods of finding exo-planets (planets orbiting other suns) is to detect a slight wobble in the light of a sun that is caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet (Henrik wrote a great article about it a few weeks ago). Obviously, a bigger planet has a stronger pull, causing more severe wobbles that are easier to detect, but small planets, like ours, would make very small pulls on the sun, and therefore require a very precise measurement of light in order to detect it. Current technology does not allow for this, but they claim that this laser just might do the trick.

One thing that made me pause a bit though is the claim that it will improve the accuracy of detection 100-fold, which certainly seems like a tall order. I’m not really basing that on anything scientific (and the fact that the press-release comes from NIST probably means that my concerns are unfounded), but an improvement by two orders of magnitude is not something seen every-day.

Good question right? If we’re so great and at the top of the foodchain because of how smart we are, why haven’t more animals evolved in the same way? Why are so many of them stupid and seemingly entirely reliant on instinct rather then learning things?

This is the question that Dr. Tadeusz Kawecki from the University of Fribourg tries to answer in his latest round of experiments. I’m afraid that, once again, i’m left with a newspaper article, from NY Times this time around, but they actually cite which journal it’s about to appear in and it seems like a fairly straightforward article, so we’ll run with it.

While i can of course recommend reading the entire article as it is pretty interesting, it is also 2 pages long and if you’re anything like me you have a short attention span (generation Y and all), so i’ll summarize it quickly. What they did was use flies, and performed selective breeding on the ones exhibiting a better ability to learn. The test was to let them taste two jellies of different colors, both with delicious smell to the fly, but one of them spiked with an icky taste. The flies that were later able display that they had learned from their experience and chose the color not containing the crappy taste, were kept and bred. They did this for 15 generations and the results were noticeable, the new breed of flies were much faster to learn then the original breed. Despite them being better learners though, they did not have the upper hand when it came to survival, showing that brawns may win over brains.

It is therefore clear that flies can evolve into smarter creatures fairly fast, but do not do so in nature as it is not beneficial for them. The doctor proposes that they reach an equilibrium of sorts between learning power and instincts. There were some other results in there as well, that suggested that in such simple creatures that the very act of learning could be destructive, and even proposed that this is something that should perhaps be looked into with humans as well (although that all seemed very speculative).

Well i don’t dare to try and explain much more of the article for fear of getting something wrong (i’m a physicist after all! Not a biologist), but that was the gist of it. Like i said, i can recommend reading it for yourself, it’s not very dry and i found it to be easy to grasp (the basics of it anyway).

Alright, right out of weekend mode (not a lot of press-releases there) and into week-day mode. A new website, called the Virtual Seismic Atlas, has been opened as a collaboration between University of Leeds and University of Aberdeen (and funded by various energy giants), that gives free a bunch of geological interpretations of seismological data that gives insight into the composition of the earths crust (and what’s to be found under seabeds). This is the kind of data used by oil companies to find oil wells and such, i’ll admit that i had a quick look and realized i had no idea what i was looking at, so it’s probably not something that the general public is going to wet their pants about, but i’m sure that for scientists not given access to this rather exclusive data before, and of course students of geology/geophysics etc, this is great news.

The data is processed from making controlled earthquakes, which is a fancy way of saying “Blowing shit up” (although there are other ways to shake the earth, but you get the idea), in scientific terms it’s called reflection seismology. The earthquake/explosion sends shockwaves through the earths crust, that are then reflected off of various compositions in it. By measuring the time it takes for it to come back, they can tell how far down it is (i’d also imagine that the strength of the reflected wave will tell them something about what it is that reflected it, but i could be way off on that). It’s more or less the same principal you’ll see in radars, where they send out electromagnetic waves and see how/if they are reflected back.

Well the title may be a bit dramatic, but i wanted to do a quick post on binary (0’s and 1’s) and i can only assume that Hollywood is right and computers are indeed plotting our inevitable destruction (and are presumably doing so in binary). Bottomline is, i once again saw a pretty cool video on youtube and wanted to do a quick post about it. Unlike the Brian Cox TED-Talk video though, i know a bit (get it?!) about binary so i’ll explain a little. Here’s the video if you want to skip he explenation, but if you don’t understand how binary math works it might be fun to read below the video first and then watch it (although i’ll admit it’s not as exciting as the video).

Binary addition is one of the simplest thing you can do with binary numbers really, and it gives a neat little window into how computers work (on a very simple level anyway). So lets say you have 3 bits, so your binary code will be any permutation of 3 0’s or 1’s, like 000, 010 101 etc. First off, we need to know how we read binary numbers, so lets call the 3 bits for a,b and c, so our number is abc. We start by numbering each decimal place, counting up from zero, starting from the right, so c is in the zeroth place, b in the first, and a in the second place. We then take our bit, and multiply it by two lifted to the power of whatever decimal place we are in and add them all up. So the mathematical equation would look like this: abc=a*2^2 + b*2^1 + c*2^0. Now we know that 2^0=1, 2^1=2 and 2^2=4 (next places are 8, 16,32 etc. as you see in the video). So putting it all together we see that 101=1*4+0*2+1*1=5.

What happens if i want to add two binary numbers together? Well the math rules are really quite simple, 0+0=0, 1+0=1, 0+1=1 and 1+1=0 (but here you carry the 1 over to the next decimal). So lets say we are looking at 001 (1) and 010 (2), we start and take the first number to the right in both numbers, that’s 1+0=1, second number in both added together is 0+1=1 while the third is 0+0=1, so in the end we get 011, and using the knowledge we had before we see that it’s 3, which is obviously the correct answre for 2+1. These are clearly exceedingly simple numbers, but expanding this into much larger numbers is really just a formality of adding more bits, it obviously takes longer to calculate, but the method is the exact same.

Hopefully that was clear enough, writing math in HTML isn’t the most end-user friendly thing in the world, but as always we can recommend the wikipedia article on it, if you still have questions.

If you read my post from yesterday, you might remember that i called Phi Plait a bit of a rockstar when it comes to science blogging, well this guy Brian Cox, is an actual rockstar (having toured with Jimmy Page) who is a legit physicist working at CERN. Funnily enough he was the one inviting Phil to Europe (perhaps a secret movement for a super-nerdy rockband is in the making?).

I wanted to bring you this great video of him doing a talk at TED, where he explains the Large Hadron Collider, why it was built, what it hopes to find, and what he thinks it may find. I thought it was great, because, to be honest, i don’t know much at all about particle physics, and Brian Cox is excellent at explaining things in a very pedagogic way. I honestly can’t think of 16 minutes better spent then getting up to snuff on what the greatest science experiment of all times is all about.

On a slightly different note, the TED talks are simply great, and there’s a great variety of things discussed there. Their basic idea is “Ideas worth spreading” and the best talks given each year are presented in their youtube account. I highly recommend going there and checking out some of the videos that catch your fancy.

First things first, sorry for the lack of updates in the past few days, partly caused by not finding much interesting stuff to write about, and partly caused by beer-drinking induced by various Christian and socialist holidays. Drinking aside, it’s been awfully quiet around here for a few days so sorry about that.

I’m going to try something new in this post, so let me know if it’s something you’d like to see more of or if you’d prefer for this kind of link-spamming to stay on reddit/digg etc. I realize that these posts tend to be like the clip-show of blogging, but bear with me. The basic idea is that I often see interesting science stuff around the interwebs, but it’s not really news as much as it is posts by other science bloggers about something interesting. Now I’d like to expose you to it, but it would basically be stealing their content if we did a post on the exact same thing here, so we’ll try it like this.

Seven warning signs of bogus science: This article is a bit long, but even if you just skim through it and look at the bold headlines for each section, it’s 100% worth it. It is basically a pocket guide to spotting when a proposed science theory/news is bullcrap. Originally intended to help judges decide if scientific evidence in court was good or bad science, having the skill to spot red-flags in stuff like this is something everyone should have.

Bad astronomy’s video tour of CERN: Phil Plait, the man behind bad astronomy is quite the jet-setting rockstar when it comes to science bloggers. He was actually invited to Europe for a few days and got the grand tour of the new Large Hadron Collider over at CERN. Check out his youtube video as he guides you through it, the size of it is incredibly impressive and i, at least, find it to be awe-inspiring thinking of all the things that went into creating it and how complex it is, such a feat of engineering.

Alright that’s about it for this time around. Not a whole lot to start with, but hopefully (assuming your verdict isn’t that you hate these kinds of posts), we can expand on this and have more substantial link-hoarding post next time.

This video is damn cool, and combines the ever popular high-speed camera, with so-called Schlieren pictures.

The basic idea here is quite intuitive and in fact you’ve probably seen these effects many times in your life. What’s happening is that although we can not see shock waves directly, they create different densities in in the air, which then in turn has a different index of refraction (which means that light that hits low density air is bent in a different way from light that hits the high density). The result is that you get a sort of shadow-picture, that then shows how the air is reacting. An example of this that you’ve probably seen, is the shadow of hot air rising from a candle. If you place a light behind the candle, and look at the shadow hitting the table, you’ll see how hot air is moving around the candle, even though it is naked to the visible eye invisible to the naked eye. This is more or less what they are doing in this video, although they obviously have a very refined technique to get great videos like these.