MetaFilter posts tagged with Science

"Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes."

defenestration — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:49:17 -0800

Revisionaries: How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks.

Visionary Engineer

peacay — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:34:34 -0800

Visionary Engineer : the Harold 'Doc' Edgerton digital collection consolidates the large body of work by the pioneer of stroboscopic high-speed photography. Iconic pictures, for instance. [via Slice of MIT] Previously: one, two, three.

A New Molecular Way of Fabricating Transistors

Hardcore Poser — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:37:26 -0800

A team of scientists from Yale University and the up-and-coming Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea have managed to fabricate intricate electrical contacts to produce a transistor from a benzene molecule. This is a culmination of decades of work by Mark Reed, who is conservative in describing the discovery's immediate potential.

“We’re not about to create the next generation of integrated circuits,” Reed said. “But after many years of work gearing up to this, we have fulfilled a decade-long quest and shown that molecules can act as transistors.”

Takhee Lee, A former postdoctoral associate and collaborator of Reed's, led the team at Gwangju. Gwangju has modeled its research departments in the "CalTech style", focusing on a small core of the most promising students.

Protecting Nature's Gems

netbros — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 06:09:18 -0800

Rising up from deep within the aquifer, cool clear water flows from hundreds of springs that dot the Florida landscape. Florida springs are natural wonders that are threatened constantly. A team of journalists, filmmakers and researchers documented how water travels through the aquifer, springs and downriver to the Gulf of Mexico. Located in the Florida Panhandle near Tallahassee, Wakulla Spring is a colossal spring system. On average, more than 250 million gallons of water flow from Wakulla Spring every day forming a nine-mile river that reaches the Gulf of Mexico. Florida springs database with location and maps by county.

What we really want to discover in the near future

jjray — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:45:13 -0800

Decades of Future Science. In which advances of the next few decades are wishfully thought up.

The duck's penis

chorltonmeateater — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:42:28 -0800

Carl Zimmer on the duck's incredibly long, corkscrew-shaped, ballistic penis.

My tale is rich with deep scientific significance, resplendent with surprising insights into how evolution works, far beyond the banalities of “survival of the fittest,” off in a realm of life where sexual selection and sexual conflict work like a pair sculptors drunk on absinthe, transforming biology into forms unimaginable. But this story is also accompanied with video. High-definition, slow-motion duck sex video. And I would imagine that the sight of spiral-shaped penises inflating in less than a third of second might be considered in some quarters to be not exactly safe for work. It’s certainly not appropriate for ducklings.

[As Carl says, video links are possibly NSFW.] Ed Yong has another good write-up of the same subject at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

he of the weird al hair and santa claus beard

kliuless — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:14:25 -0800

R.Sapolsky on the uniqueness of humans in relation to the rest of the animal world (via)

The Far-Reaching Consequences of Bad Science

SpringAquifer — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:26:16 -0800

Mumps has stricken New York, in the U.S.'s largest outbreak of the disease since 2006. Infections have been largely contained to the Orthodox Jewish community. Although some reports have linked these infections to the refusal of vaccinations due to religious reasons, that doesn't seem to be the case here. Nor does there seem to be any particular reluctance to vaccinate with in the Jewish community. However, the CDC has traced these infections back to an asymptomatic 11-year-old boy returning from the U.K., where "a mumps outbreak is ongoing with approximately 4,000 cases, primarily in unvaccinated young adults in the general population." Vaccine effectiveness isn't perfect, of course. But vaccination rates in the U.K. are relatively low, in part due to a now-debunked 1998 study over the safety of the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine; "[a]fter its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire 'herd immunity' from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated." (previously)

Season's Gweetings

netbros — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 20:05:09 -0800

The World's Smallest Snowman is 10 µm across, 1/5th the width of a human hair. The snowman was made from two tin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism. The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide (or 0.001 mm), is ion beam deposited platinum.

Frankeinstein's Frog

CitrusFreak12 — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:59:08 -0800

"After 20 seconds or so the quivering turned into a restless jig. The legs twitched violently, pumping up and down as if they were getting ready for one last hop."
A look at the curious, somewhat unnerving, and morbidly humorous culinary phenomenon of dancing frog legs.

Extra! Extra! Football causes brain damage!

reenum — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:49:22 -0800

Malcolm Gladwell did an article about this in the New Yorker, but this GQ article shows the opposition the researchers who discovered CTE faced from the NFL.

There is no evidence that Quetzalcoatlus could see dinosaur pee with its ultraviolet vision, or that a herd of hadrosaurs could knock over a predator with their concentrated infrasound blasts.

brundlefly — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:45:29 -0800

Paleontologist Matt Wedel was a talking head in the Discovery Channel's Clash of the Dinosaurs, but was not very happy with the final product. The production company, Dangerous, responds. Finally, the Discovery Channel steps up.

Explore the Surface of Mercury

SpringAquifer — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:37:43 -0800

NASA's MESSENGER team (previously: 1, 2, 3), with help from the U.S. Geological Survey, released yesterday the first global map of the planet Mercury. The map stitches together images from MESSENGER's three recent flybys of the planet with those from Mariner 10, which saw about 45% of the planet in the mid-1970s. While a seemingly simple task, "the challenging part has been to make cartographically accurate maps from a series of images with varying resolution (from about 100 to 900 meters per pixel) and lighting conditions (from noontime high Sun to dawn and dusk) taken from a spacecraft traveling at speeds greater than 2 kilometers per second (2,237 miles per hour)." This map serves an "extremely important use as a planning tool" and signifies that MESSENGER "is no longer a flyby mission but instead will soon become an in-depth, non-stop global observatory of the Solar System’s innermost planet.” Also available to explore on the USGS's Map-a-Planet website: Venus, the Moon, Mars, Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, Io, Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Iapetus, and Enceladus.

Good things come in small packages. And in Threes.

Hardcore Poser — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:50:37 -0800

Nanoparticles often get a bad rap in popular media. From discredited scenarios (grey goo) to more plausible concerns (cancer), often the emphasis in reporting is on its risks rather than its potential rewards. But this has been a good week for the tiny science. The discovery at Harvard of a new technique for making alcohol esters at room temperature with gold nanoparticles may result in much cleaner, greener fabric production. A new method of gel electrophoresis patented by researchers at Bath University creates a molecular sieve to sort proteins by size and shape, raising the possibility of a blood test for Alzheimers or similar conditions. And a group at MIT have performed analyses on a new way to create stable Casimir molecules that could potentially solve problems that have hindered the creation of complex moving nanostructures.

Feynman at his best

mhjb — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:07:21 -0800

"Fun To Imagine" is a BBC series from 1983 featuring theoretical physicist Richard Feynman thinking aloud. What is fire? How do rubber bands work? Why do mirrors flip left-right but not up-down? All is explained in his lovely meanderingly lucid manner. Part 1: Jiggling atoms Part 2: Fire Part 3: Rubber Bands Part 4: Magnets Part 5: Electricity Part 6: The Mirror Part 7: The Train Part 8: Seeing Things Part 9: Big Numbers and Stuff (a) Part 10: Big Numbers and Stuff (b) Part 11: Ways of Thinking (a) Part 12: Ways of Thinking (b)

Pixar Meets Molecular Biology

jjray — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:51:48 -0800

The crowded, complex environment inside living cells makes understanding spatial relationships difficult for biologists. Now, 3D animation software Maya is being used not just for illustration, but to see how our intuition holds up. E.g. an animation of the process of endocytosis (Quicktime movie) by Janet Iwasa and Tomás Kirchhausen.

BoarCroc! DogCroc! DuckCroc! Pancake Croc! RatCroc!

brundlefly — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:49:43 -0800

"A suite of five ancient crocs, including one with teeth like boar tusks and another with a snout like a duck’s bill, have been discovered in the Sahara." Abstract and PDF of paper You can find a ginormous list of stories about the find here.

science! cookies

lalex — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:30:33 -0800

Orchids and dandelions

oinopaponton — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:38:36 -0800

The orchid hypothesis “profoundly recasts the way we think about human [genetic] frailty.”

Cannibal holocaust

Artw — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:39:42 -0800

"Heads were skinned and muscles removed from the brain case in order to remove the skullcap. Incisions and scrapes on jaws indicate that tongues were cut out." "Scrape marks inside the broken ends of limb bones indicate that marrow was removed." "Whatever actually happened at Herxheim, facial bones were smashed beyond recognition." - Neolithic mass canibalism in southern Germany.

The Super-Kamiokande

Chan — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:50:30 -0800

Hi-res pictures of the Super-Kamiokande, a neutrino detector in Japan. The Super-Kamiokande, also known as the Super-K, is used to detect neutrinos, electrically neutral particles that are able to pass through matter. Effectively, it's a giant pool with walls made of phototubes used to detect Cherenkov radiation emitted by the interaction between neutrinos and electrons in the water. But even if you didn't understand any of that, it's still shiny and neat to look at.

Need ammo?

Neilopolis — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:55:38 -0800

How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic: "...a handy one-stop shop for all the material you should need to rebut the more common anti-global warming science arguments constantly echoed across the internet."

Science!

Artw — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:37:33 -0800

The Year's Most Amazing Scientific Images

Goo

mhjb — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:57:40 -0800

Amorphous blob robot takes first steps (SLYT)

Selected Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Electric Dragon — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:05:07 -0800

To celebrate the start of its 350th year, the Royal Society has put online 60 of its most memorable scientific papers. The Royal Society's head of archives, Keith Moore, talks about some of them in an audio slideshow. The papers (warning - they're all PDFs) include: Isaac Newton's New Theory on Light And Colors. (1672) Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's observations of Little Animals in Rainwater. (1677) The Electrical Kite of Benjamin Franklin. (1752) Thomas Young's Wave theory of light. (1802) Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden's gold foil experiment which led to the nuclear model of the atom. (1909)