Back in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan demolished a couple of Buddha statues that had been standing there for around 1500 years, behind them were some caves that were adorned with paintings from a similar era (around 5-900 AD). Now don’t worry, i have no intentions on touching on politics here (something we steer clear of here at reducedmass), but the point is, although the caves are now gone, pieces of them have been tested at a European lab and have lead to some surprising discoveries.

It turns out, after having examined fragments from the paintings (a cross-section of a painting piece can be seen in the picture to the left), they reached the conclusion that they were made with oil! Why is this exciting you may ask? Well until now, it was believed that oil painting was first developed in the 15th century, and by Europeans. Now this isn’t exactly a scientific breakthrough or anything, but i think it illustrates nicely how science is involved in almost everything.

To figure out what the paintings were composed of, they used so-called synchrotron radiation, which is more-or-less just a machine that accelerates electrons around in a big circle, producing x-rays. These x-rays are very strong and focused, and can be used to decipher the structure of materials using a variety of techniques, and they actually had to use a good many of them on this project to get a full picture of all the layers. Other materials found in the pictures include natural resins, proteins, gums, and in some cases, a varnish-like layer.

If you want to read more about the Buddha statues and the caves that contained these oil paintings, I suggest reading the wikipedia page on it, and eventually branching out from their sources.

Ok this is not really the kind of science news we usually report on, but seeing as how i’m a sucker for trashy day-time television, such as Maury’s talkshow where he routinely has episodes doing paternity tests on multiple guys, i thought i’d mention this. Apparently some would-be baby-daddy’s have been trying to cheat the system by a not-so-novel and fairly gross approach. It’s a variant of the good old “clean urine” technique utilized by athletes for decades, with a little twist.

When DNA tests are taken, they usually obtain a sample from the subject by using mouth-swab, and a DNA analysis is done on that sample and compared to another. In this particular case it’s a paternity test so it’s compared to some kids DNA where they can see the similarities if the kid has the guys genes. So the guy mentioned in this specific press release, got results back from the scientists that were pretty much impossible unless there were two different DNA’s in the sample they collected. When confronted with this he confessed, and it turns out he was carrying an extra bottle of saliva from one of his friends, and put that in his mouth right before the mouth-swab.

Science prevailed though and saw through it fairly easily, and although this has lead to a new procedure in paternity testing in hopes of avoiding similar situations, it would be almost impossible to sneak one past the laboratory using this method. They will of course keep trying to find new and innovative methods of cheating the tests (after all, murder trials hang on these things as well), and scientists will try to keep up and out-smart them. They go to quite some lengths to try and cheat it though, as you can also read about in the press-release, they’ve had similar problems before with DNA tests from blood-samples, where the subjects tried to get a blood transfusion shortly before their test in hopes of beating it.

As you may have noticed, last Saturday was the whole “earth hour” thing where people turned off their lights for an hour to feel good about saving the world. Google joined the fun and put the background on their search-page to black (at least in some regions) and linked to this article from the google blog. The article basically adresses why google does not switch 100% over to black. It says:

One idea, suggested by the site called “Blackle” (which is not related to Google, by the way, though the site does use our custom search engine), is to reduce energy used by monitors by providing search with a black background. We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. Detailed results from a new study confirm this.

They make it sound like it doesn’t make a difference and even suggest it may be counter-productive! But if you actually look at the results of the article they point to, it specifically states that it is only LCD’s (flatscreens) that are not effected, but that CRT’s (the big old monitors) certainly are! Looking at their numbers, there is 13% less power consumption on average for CRT’s when running a black background. If we combine this with what google says, that 25% of their users still use CRT’s, then there would certainly be power to be saved.

I’ve done some quick calculations to illustrate how much power could be saved. I should state right from the get-go that these are very bushleague calculations and are based on numbers that are largely guesswork, specifically the number of users google has and how much time they spend on their site. I’ll downtone all numbers a good deal to try and keep this as conservative as possible and not get into sensational numbers here. The main point is that energy CAN be saved.

The results

We’re doing this a little backwards. If you’re interested in how we did the actual calculations, go below the dashed line. If you just want to hear the bottomline in all this, just read this.

What we found was that slightly less then 5% of the total power consumption (of monitors) could be saved by a black background. This was the equivilant of 1.65*10^10 Joules per day, or around 4500 kiloWatt hours. To put this into perspective, a normal US household uses around 8900 kilowatt Hours a year (source). So if google did this, they would not be shutting down any powerplants, but at the same time, saying it would have no effect is misleading.

I want to make it clear though, that i am not accusing google of anything sinister. I just found a small error and wanted to elaborate on it. It is also a fairly small power consumption, and i don’t blame google for not wanting to go with a black background, as it’s ugly as hell.

P.S. I didn’t want to clutter this article any more, but in the next few days I’ll try and elaborate on WHY it is that CRT monitors save energy, and the LCD’s do not.

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The data

1) Average number of users on google each day.
In order to find this, I compared the “reach” number they had on www.alexa.com with the “reach” number of another website that I happen to know the exact number of visitors on (no it’s not this one. It’s a fairly large site so hopefully it’s as accurate as possible). This gave me a number of 160.000.000 users per-day. I’ll drastically cut it down to 100.000.000 so it’s easier to work with, and make the number more conservative.

2) Average time spent on google per day by each user.
For simplicity I’ll assume this to be one minute. In actuality it is probably 3-4 times as long, but again, lets keep it simple and not blow the numbers up.

The calculations:
The data we have to work with is from the Techloggs article. It tells us on average how many watts (which is Joules (unit for energy) per second) an LCD and CRT uses with white and black background, respectively. Our equation should roughly be:

Total energy per day, per person = Average Watts(Joule/second) * 60 seconds

Replace the Average Watts with the numbers given from Techlogg and then multiply the LCD number with 75.000.000 and the CRT number with 25.000.000 (75% and 25% of the google userbase). Then add the two to get the total energy used per day. We did this for both white and black background, and then subtracted the two numbers. That gives us the total energy saved per day (in Joules) and to get it in Watts, we simply divide by 3.600.000 (you can see how that works over at Wikipedias article on kWh).

I knew it… The collective scientific society is all part of a giant conspiracy to destroy the World. Our fragile planet and all of its inhabitants. But we are in luck. A clever American has decided to let said world know of this hidden crusade against life, and mentor us in the right direction by taking the matter to federal court.

Thank you! So say we all.

Ok, enough with the sarcasm, but seriously, I’m getting a bit annoyed by this kind of stuff. These LHC discussions are taken up all over the media, and while its lovely to hear something about science and physics in public, it’s also a bit sad that everyone is so afraid of something that is easily the most magnificent experiment scientists has ever built, and the results from this giant accelerator could be some of the most significant in the history of science.

Seriously, there is no chance of any harm to come from this. The article does an excellent job explaining this, so I won’t bother, but just think about it. This experiment is in the hands of some of the brightest minds around, and they are not interested in destroying the world. I think one of the problems with this is that scientists are so scientific that they can never say: “Look, there’s no chance in hell that anything will happen”. It’s just not scientific to say never, impossible or something like that. Science is based on testing theories and assigning probabilities to those theories.

But I guess there’s nothing to do about it. And as long as there are a lot of scientists ready to debunk the FUD when it appears, people just have to listen to what is really going on, and they’ll find out how exciting this stuff really is.

Wait… maybe they should build another Noah’s Ark.

Ok you caught me, this is not really science related in the way we usually report on things, but it deals with nerds/geeks so I could not pass it up (being a geek myself (without glasses)).

The basic results are simple: People who wear glasses are not nerds/geeks. How do they know? I have no idea, social research is really outside my scope and i usually make fun of my friends who study it (all in good fun. I could never get through the insane amount of pages they have had to read). So instead of doing my normal spiel of trying to explain what happened in laymen terms, I’ll suffice with a comment from the lead researcher herself (Rebecca Scott from University of Melbourne).

We have literally busted the myth that people who wear glasses are introverted or have particular personality characteristics. They are more likely to be agreeable and open, rather than closed and introverted

And from the press release

For the first time in a study into personality and myopia, participants were analysed using a state-of-the-art measure of the five major personality factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism), administered by psychologists from the University of Melbourne.

If you want to read the whole thing, check out the press release, I’m afraid i couldn’t find it on the University web-page, which is always my preferred source, but Eurekalert is a fairly reputable source, so I’ll cross my fingers that they are not toying with the emotions of geeks worldwide.