The Rise Of The Time Machines


Do you own a time machine?  The chances are that if you are reading this, then you own a time machine.  They are fairly cheap nowadays.  Like so many things, the first time machine was built for the military and cost a lot of money.

What do you think happened to the first person to claim to be able to predict the future using a machine built on scientific principles?  You may think he was treated with scorn, treated as a crank.  In fact he was given lots of money.

His invention was funded, not because the government of the day went to school with him, but because he was able to validate his method.  Scientists using the same method were able to predict future events with great accuracy.

You may have noticed that a lot of posts about neuroscience research on scientificblogging.com describe new discoveries about the synapse.  If you are not a neuroscientists you might wonder why we get so fired up about the synapse (pun intended). 

Well the answer is simple -- understanding how synapses function is the most important question in the field of neuroscience research.  And we are getting close to the answer.
 
For me what's so cool about the synapse is that they are constantly changing.

But I want to know what you think -- why do you think the synapse is a cool thing to study?  If you could ask a neuroscientists about their synapse research what would you want to know?

I just noticed a study from a few months back that correlated male shopping habits to ... evolution.   Yes, the necessary survival skills that women used for foraging and men used to hunt evolved into the inability of men to match socks and the reason women can't find the escalator in the shopping mall if you give them directions.

So if you are disinclined to believe, as friend-of-Obama Larry Summers does, that women cannot do math, you militant anti-science types will really dislike knowing that women are intrinsically obligated to spend the day picking through racks of clothes with friends and talking about that "Sex in the City" movie.

Think you're rational? Think again. Here's but one example, gentle reader, of your brain unbound by reason.

Blue Devil basketball tickets are a hot commodity: there are far more fans than seats. And so some students enter a ticket lottery.

After one of these lotteries, Duke researchers posing as ticket scalpers found that students who lost the raffle were willing to pay $170 for a seat, while students who won tickets would only sell their seats for an average of $2,400.

Sometimes my sympathy for science magazines (in print and online), which try to keep intelligent readers informed on the progress in basic science, gets dampened by observing how they end up providing a narrow-sighted look at things. What is at stake is usually not science popularization: an article you read does not need to inform you of all what is going on in a field of research; rather, it is the correct acknowledgement of the different efforts. It sometimes happens that a group works hard on something, they believe they have made great progress and furthered everybody's knowledge in the field, and then an article appears that discusses somebody else's contribution, which came later, was less successful, and less valuable.

The black hole at the edge of galaxy NGC 7793, twelve million light years from Earth, has been found to be doing something rare - emitting powerful jets of particles of a total length of 1,000 light years.  The energy produced by matter falling into a black hole this size is usually transformed into X-rays, not into jets, but this one is the exception - a miniature version of certain supermassive black holes present in the active nuclei of galaxies.

Future technology such as quantum cryptography and computation, or perhaps even larger scale teleportation, requires a deeper understanding of the phenomenon known as "entanglement", the quantum non-local connection, an aspect of quantum theory at the heart of the EPR paradox developed by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935 which was experimentally verified in 1980 by Alain Aspect.

Two photons are entangled if the properties of one depend on those of the other, whatever the distance separating them. A new source of entangled photons twenty times brighter than all existing systems has been developed by a team from the Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nano-structures (LPN) of CNRS and they say the device is capable of considerably boosting the rate of quantum communications.