Category Archives: Science

Science, Society

Unpredictability on Trial

L'Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy. A goverment's office...

L’Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy. A goverment’s office disrupted by the 2009 earthquake ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L’Aquila_earthquake ) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week six scientists and an ex-official were convicted of manslaughter in Italy because, it was said, they had given misleading and falsely reassuring advice to government officials.  Following a tremor in the L’Aquila area in 2009 scientists told officials that a further quake was not impossible but not likely.  In this region people would usually stay outside following a smaller quake but taking the advice as meaning they were safe many went home and when a larger quake occurred many were tragically killed.

Scientists have been trying to find some pattern, some definite precursor effect that will indicate an imminent earthquake for decades but aside from the theory that earthquakes can process along fault lines as movement during one can move the geological stress further along the ability to say when one will occur still eludes them – therefore the best they can say is that one may occur.

The Fortean literature is full of stories of Earthlights – small balls of glowing plasma – floating over fault lines and animals leaving the immediate area in the hours before quakes but again these effects haven’t been documented or proven.

If the authorities had said “there is a possibility that this smaller quake could lead to a massively destructive one” and evacuated every time there was a quake in a seizmologically active area it would cause chaos and cost a fortune, and how long do you tell people to stay away?  A follow-up quake could happen the day everyone returns.

The L’Aquila verdict will have an effect on science, as many are already saying; the journal Nature called the verdict “perverse and the sentence ludicrous” and called for protests, and the head of Italy’s disaster body has resigned stating that the commission could not work under such pressure in the future.  It will make scientists more weary about telling anyone about their discoveries, or offering any advice at all just in case one time something goes wrong.

[BBC News Magazine, BBC News, BBC News]

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Science

Imaging Atoms

Graphene Micrograph

Graphene Micrograph (Photo credit: Argonne National Laboratory)

As well as looking out into space and simultaneously back in time with the Hubble space telescope to understand where we came from scientists are also looking further inwards to understand how we are here.

In the last few months the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have confirmed the existence of a Higgs boson though this is simply a beginning rather than an end as there is still much to understand about this fascinating sub-atomic particle that is theorised to give matter mass and whether it is the Higgs Boson they expected based on computer models.

Now a team at IBM have used a modified form of Atomic Force Microscopy to image a single molecule showing the atomic bonds.  This technique would enable, for example, inspection of sheets of single-atom thick Graphene for imperfections.  As with so many discoveries and new technologies this will no doubt have many more future applications as well as furthering our understanding of our world.

[Higgs Boson & Molecule Imaging at Gizmodo UK]

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Jubilee Britain, Science, Tech

21st Century Hobbies & British Pi

English: Extract from Raspberry Pi board at Tr...

English: Extract from Raspberry Pi board at TransferSummit 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It has been said that having a hobby is a particularly British thing, when I was younger I used to spend evenings listening to REM albums while building model aircraft – many of which still linger in my mum and dad’s attic along with my old school books.

In the past some people have collected stamps, cheese labels and even old street lamps (which looked more like street theft in the BBC documentary on hobbies I’ve just watched while thinking about the subject of this post).  All these activities though gave people ways to enjoy their leisure time and as we reached the end of the twentieth century technology was playing its part in hobbies whether it was in building kit computers, programming home computers or playing video games whose graphics required a kind of leap of imagination that would be unthinkable to today’s Call of Duty playing generation of gamers.

Hobbies were something to be wanted, something to share and talk about.  Today though many of us grown-ups at least don’t have hobbies possibly because of the vast array of distractions from TV and the internet (and yes I’m aware of the irony.) 

Ooh, QI’s on the telly, er, be back in a bit…

I have heard people saying that their hobby is buying and selling things on Ebay, others that when they’re not watching TV or down the pub they’re on Bingo or Poker sites so the prospect of making money is a major driver rather than the satisfaction of making something or completing a collection.

One area that had been fading but is now bounding back is computing as a hobby – and typically it’s a British invention that is leading the charge.  Raspberry Pi began as an attempt to reverse the decline in the numbers of students going to Cambridge to read computer science which had once been the domain of many hobbyist programmers.  A group at Cambridge identified that something had changed in the way young people used computers; they were being taught word and excel in ICT lessons at school (when I was at school I was taught about mainframes) and at home they used games consoles and PCs rather than the ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s of the eighties where part of the enjoyment was typing in your own programs.

What was needed was a modern Speccy – a low-cost computer that could boot Linux and be programmed to do whatever you wanted.  The computer was designed and even before it went on sale its low-cost and versatility sparked the buried creative juices in hobbyists across the country and it has sold fantastically well and is soon to be Made in Britain too.  The foundation set up to develop the computer has also had enquiries from developing countries where such devices can provide access to technology previously unavailable.

The little one-board computer will be finding its way into a myriad of homebuilt projects in the years to come as well as its original use in encouraging the next generation of British tech engineering pioneers.

[Raspberry Pi 2.0  Gizmodo UK]  [Raspberry Pi Games Platform BBC News]

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Science, Tech

Worldwide Collaboration & Amazing Discoveries

English: The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) begi...

English: The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) begins its separation from Space Shuttle Discovery following its release on mission STS-82. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As more of the world’s population is permanently connected via broadband to the internet the potential for distributed computing and collaboration on projects increases.

Already projects such as Seti@Home have used computers belonging to members of the public who’d signed up to the programme to background process signals received from space and other similar projects are in operation; Wikipedia is edited by an army of volunteers the world over as well as individuals who may only use their own specialised knowledge to create or edit a particular page; and researchers have been digging information from the vast resources of Google Earth.

Now ESA have opened up the archives of Hubble space telescope imagery to the public so that previously unprocessed data could be unveiled in all it’s glory.  The volunteers were unpaid but prizes were given for the best images to emerge from the process, those involved were simply doing it for the challenge and the chance to make a new discovery.  One such volunteer, Judy Schmidt, did discover an object that would have otherwise remained unseen in the immense vault of data.

A sample of the images can be seen over at Gizmodo UK and ESA’s site.

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Science, Tech

Aerial Archeology

Argentinan Satellite SAC-A is deployed from Sp...

Argentinan Satellite SAC-A is deployed from Space Shuttle STS-88 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ever since the military first looked at an early aircraft and thought “I wonder if we can use that to see what they’re up to” technology has steadily improved aerial surveillance.  From film cameras in high-altitude Spitfires to top-secret satellites that, of course, aren’t looking at anything and don’t even exist, honestly, that mini-space shuttle was just for research.

Recently though aerial and satellite photography have become accessible to anyone with internet access and as well as giving people the opportunity to see their house from above, or just lazily spending an afternoon following old defunct railway lines this massive resource is being used to locate topographical features that aren’t immediately obvious from the ground.

Archeologists have known for some time that buried structures can leave traces on the surface such as lines in grass or subtle dips in the ground but now both professional and amateur researchers are finding intriguing structures across the world.

One such discovery was recently made by Angela Micol, a satellite archaeology researcher from North Carolina who has found two sites in Egypt that appear to feature previously undiscovered pyramids.

So the satellites and planes may be occasionally photographing us now but they can help us to find our past.

See photos and article at Gizmodo UK.

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Funny, Random, Science

Ever Decreasing Circles

English: Tree Stump, near to Langbank, Renfrew...

English: Tree Stump, near to Langbank, Renfrewshire, Great Britain. Looking past the tree stump and silage pit over the River Clyde to the west side of Dumbarton. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most people have at one point said “I’m going round in circles” but many experiments have shown that a blindfolded person, when told to walk in a straight line, will end up walking in a curve to one side.  On the edition of QI tonight Jack Dee suggested this may be some kind of self-preservation response but nobody really knows why it is.

On the same programme the example of the experiment described involved a man who set off across a field blindfolded and spiralled right in smaller circles until he fell over a tree stump.  This proves one of two things however – humans can detect minute changes in the Earth’s magnetic or gravitational fields caused by things like tree stumps and are drawn towards them, or the universe has a sense of humour.

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Science, Tech

I’ve Seen The Future And… It Likes Cats

Cat bliss

Cat bliss (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

People have for many years worried about computers and robots becoming self-aware and somehow overthrowing us but it seems perhaps we don’t need to be quite so concerned; our weapon in ensuring that the global hypercomputer grows up to be nice?  Cats.

Ok, bit of an exaggeration.  We’ll need more than cats.

But anyway, Google have again created something impressive in its research labs; a virtual neural network that turned out to be like a simplified version of the human visual cortex and when it was presented with a data set consisting of images from YouTube it decided, with no training or input from programmers, to learn how to identify and define a cat and was able to generate an image of a cat based on general features.  The result is influenced by our love of filming our feline friends and sharing their antics with the world but is still a great achievement in the field.

In the future computers based on virtual neural network type structures like this would be able to intelligently search and process the vast stores of information we have and will continue to pour onto the internet.  Look forward to the day when you ask your computer for directions to Bedford and it replies “later, can’t you see I’m having a really bad day”.

[Gizmodo UK]

It should be noted here and now that I reserve the right to use a cat picture to illustrate any article on this blog where there is even a vague relevance.

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Science, Society

Stress and Depression

English: Manipulation of a stress ball, laptop...

English: Manipulation of a stress ball, laptop in background. Taken and released into the public domain by User:Kallemax. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our lives today are often more stressful than ever; longer working hours, less leisure time, pressure to achieve targets, less tolerance of mistakes and fear of losing your job, or difficulty in finding a job in the first place all contribute.  Some people claim stress is “all in the mind” some people claim to never get stressed yet probably do (me included).  It is already agreed that stress can cause fatigue, affect your personal life and has numerous psychological effects including depression.

New research from Yale University now supports this hypothesis showing that it causes changes in the brain at a genetic level.  In tests on rats subjected to chronic stress it was found that the gene that controls production of neuritin was less active and the rats showed symptoms of what would be called depression in humans.  Stimulation of neuritin production triggered an improvement greater than the use of conventional anti-depressants.  This also protected the rats from changes in the brain structure too such as shrinking of the hippocampus.

As well as further demonstrating that stress is a major problem this research also provides hope for new and more effective anti-depressants.

[via Gizmodo UK]

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Science, Society, Tech

Cataloguing The World

English: A Google Street View Camera Car (2008...

English: A Google Street View Camera Car (2008 Subaru Impreza Five Door) showcased on Google campus in Mountain View, CA, USA. taken by myself [User:Kowloonese] using a Canon digital camera. The picture was taken on Google Campus in Mountain View, CA, USA. Release for Public Domain. Kowloonese (talk) 04:53, 18 November 2010 (UTC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The world is big, lots of land, rivers, seas.  Our history is vast too.  The internet contains ever growing volumes of information about both.  And videos of kittens.

Search engines help with finding things on the internet of course, and even the history part as more historical documents are digitized and more history is recorded digitally, whether it be art, music, myth and legend or epic tales.

Google though continues to go beyond its core business, using search ad revenues to actually benefit people – providing free services such as YouTube (which it bought in 2006), Google Translate, Google Docs, Google Maps and so on – which are also available from Microsoft and other providers too – as well as the Android operating system which in its Ice Cream Sandwich version (4.0) is maturing into a very nice OS.  Then there’s the suite of desktop apps including Sketchup, Google Earth,  Picasa and more.  The company even looked skyward, producing Sky Map which is now an open source product.

One wonderfully useful thing Google gave us, via their fleets of cars with Johnny Five wannabees strapped to the roofs, is Street View.  It’s so useful to be able to actually see what the place you’re going to looks like, to see your route, turn by turn at street level because using our visual memory is far better that trying to remember an abstract set of directions on a top-down map alone. They even added traffic information to their Maps product recently.

Even this though was not the end as they’ve Street Viewed railway journeys, cycle routes, footpaths and walking trails and now they’re going to be photographing towpaths along rivers and canals in the UK too.  There will no doubt be privacy complaints again and parts of riversides across the country will become strangely hazy when viewed online but it will also give us more strange and funny discoveries in the images as we’ve had from the roadgoing cameras.

Another new Google project revealed this week sees the search behemoth collecting and documenting languages from around the world that are on the verge of extinction via videos, audio recordings and other documentation. The result will be presented via an interactive website.

Some people however won’t like their other announcement – a service that allows companies to track their employees’ movements via their work phones.  Well, two out of three’s not bad.

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