Vertical ship marks 50 years at sea

"Researchers have been showing off a 355 ft vertical ship in the Pacific Ocean, as it marks its 50th birthday.

FLIP, or Floating Instrument Platform, is owned by the US Navy, and flips from horizontal to a vertical position by pumping 700 tonnes of seawater into the 'handle' end."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18684075

Does Time Exist?

"Videos from our Setting Time Aright conference are gradually filtering online, courtesy of the Foundational Questions Institute. Perhaps the very first question that should be asked, of course, is whether the subject of the conference actually exists. So we recruited two well-known partisans on this issue to hash things out. Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of science who has argued forcefully that time is real — and furthermore that the arrow of time is an intrinsic part of reality, not just a byproduct of the low-entropy Big Bang. (Crazy talk.) Julian Barbour is a physicist who is well known for arguing that time doesn’t really exist, we can happily eliminate it from all of our equations of physics. (Even crazier.)"

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/10/25/does-time-exist/

The Higgs Boson Explained as Live Infographics

"The resulting movie titled "What is in the Data? The Higgs Boson Explained" only takes about 7-minutes, yet contains sufficient material to ponder for the rest of your life... It includes, for instance, a clear explanation why it is so difficult for scientists to detect the Higgs Boson particle in the experimental data, and why they
need so much data that they run the experiment 40 million times per second, each day, all year."

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2012/07/what_is_in_the_data_the_higgs_boson_explained_as_live_infographics.html

The twice reflected Moon light

"Think about the journeys of all those photons that make up this picture: some came straight from the Sun, a trip of 150 million kilometers, only to be scattered away at the last moment; some redder ones made it all the way through; some hit the moon and came toward us but were bent a bit by Earth’s air, distorting the Moon’s face; and others still came from the Sun, hit us, went to the Moon, hit there, came back to us, finally making it into the lens of a camera held by a man hanging in the cupola of a football-field-sized metal can orbiting 350 kilometers above our planet at 30,000 kilometers per hour."

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/11/19/the-twice-reflected-moon-light

Orange “O”s and Purple “P”s

"For most of us, our senses stay relatively separate: that is, we hear what we hear and see what we see. People with synesthesia, however, actually see words as colors, taste a particular flavor when they hear a familiar song, or experience other strong, automatic linkages between senses. The neurological underpinnings of the condition—how the brain connects two usually distinct senses—have remained a mystery. But researchers have now found a possible cause, they reported yesterday: neurons in the area responsible for the second sensation, such as the color that goes with the word, may be unusually excitable."

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/11/18/hyperactive-visual-cortex-neurons-may-cause-orange-os-and-purple-ps/

How to build a time machine

"Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you'll find holes and wrinkles in it. It's a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Now it's easy to show that this is true in the first three dimensions. But trust me, it's also true of the fourth dimension. There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time. Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEPHEN-HAWKING-How-build-time-machine.html

Space yacht will be first craft to travel on 'solar waves' as it sets sail for Venus

"The square shaped sail is equipped with thin-film solar cells and will use resistance created by the Sun's energy in much the same way as wind propels a yacht through water. This will provide it with enough thrust to hover and rotate.

'It is a hybrid technology of electricity and pressure', Japanese Space Agency expert Yuichi Tsuda said."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1269478/Space-yacht-craft-travel-solar-waves-sets-sail-Venus.html

Scitable: a social network for science research and education

Scitable is a social site where teachers, researchers, and students can collaborate, share work, and help one another. The “social” in Scitable’s social network is less about sharing photos of your weekend trip and more about working collaboratively with people who have similar or complimentary goals to your own. Scientific inquiry is rarely conducted in a vacuum, so Scitable aims to connect people together in meaningful ways.


http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/05/06/scitable-a-social-network-for-science-research-and-education/


http://www.nature.com/scitable

The Bilingual Advantage

"If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html

Solar System Scale Model

"Solar System Scale Model [phrenopolis.com] shows a scale model of the solar system. The planets are displayed in a scale corresponding to the first image, which is that of the sun. Unlike most solar system visualizations or models, the planets are shown at their true-to-scale average distances from the Sun."


http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/11/solar_system_scale_model.html


http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/

Going beyond our solar system

"They are of similar size to Jupiter but in much closer orbits around their parent stars. Each has a temperature of approximately 10,000 degrees Centigrade. They must therefore be extremely inhospitable to any known form of life. WASP-12 is 475 light-years from Earth, while HAT-P-20 is 230 light-years away.

Chris Fuller said "I was amazed that we could detect distant planets orbiting other stars from a telescope in the middle of Cardiff." Jon Rees added: "It is remarkable to be able to see distant worlds and work out what conditions must be like there.""

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/articles/going-beyond-our-solar-system-6613.html

Nobel Prize genius Crick was high on LSD

"Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced thedouble-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago. "

http://science.commongate.com/post/Nobel_Prize_genius_Crick_was_high_on_LSD

Ethical placebos

"A recent study found that placebos work even if the patient is told by the doctor that the drug they're taking has no 'real' medicine in it.

Huh?

We've come to understand that the placebo effect is real. If we believe we're going to get better, perform better, make the sale, etc., it often occurs that we do. That's because the brain is the single best marketing agent when it comes to selling ourselves something. If we think we're going to get better, we're much more likely to actually get better."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/02/ethical-placebos-stunning-but-not-actually-surprising.html

"In other words, in addition to the bogus medication, the volunteers were given a true story — the story of the placebo effect. They also received the care and attention of clinicians, which have been found in many other studies to be crucial for eliciting placebo effects. The combination of the story and a supportive clinical environment were enough to prevail over the knowledge that there was really nothing in the pills. People in the placebo arm of the trial got better — clinically, measurably, significantly better — on standard scales of symptom severity and overall quality of life. In fact, the volunteers in the placebo group experienced improvement comparable to patients taking a drug called alosetron, the standard of care for IBS."

http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2010/12/22/meet-the-ethical-placebo-a-story-that-heals/

Teach quantum mechanics at primary school

"My modest proposal, therefore, is to teach quantum mechanics at primary school to everyone, starting sometime around the age of five. Of course, not every child will get it. But then not every child gets music, or poetry. That doesn't stop us teaching those subjects.

But for many children the principles and ideas of quantum mechanics will sink into their subconsciouses, which will work their usual magic, making the ideas instinctive when some of those children, as adults, encounter them again."

http://adrianbowyer.blogspot.com/2011/02/kindersuperposition.html

2000 Years of Sea Level

"A group of colleagues have succeeded in producing the first continuous proxy record of sea level for the past 2000 years. According to this reconstruction, 20th-Century sea-level rise on the U.S. Atlantic coast is faster than at any time in the past two millennia."

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/06/2000-years-of-sea-level/

Lousy DNA Reveals When People First Wore Clothes

"Using DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice, researchers conclude that body lice first came on the scene approximately 190,000 years ago. And that shift, the scientists propose, followed soon after people first began wearing clothing."

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/body-lice/

Why 5, 8 and 24 Are the Strangest Numbers in the Universe

"If string theory is right, the octonions are not a useless curiosity; on the contrary, they provide the deep reason why the universe must have 10 dimensions: in 10 dimensions, matter and force particles are embodied in the same type of numbers—the octonions."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=octonions-web-exclusive

Holographic Universe (Part 1 of 5 ) its all illusion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnvM_YAwX4I

In the event of moon disaster

"Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. [...]"

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/11/in-event-of-moon-disaster.html

SF Crow's Nest

"Yahoo has ranked SFcrowsnest as among the best in the genre; we're one of only four web sites to make it into the Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction; our ranks of users still swell every month; and the nice emails we get from thousands of kind fans helps keep our morale up. "

http://www.sfcrowsnest.com/index.php