How a fish ‘broke’ a law of physics

... says a press release from Bristol University.

A recent article about lie detectors brought up a related topic; drug/bomb sniffing dogs or the more general use of police service dogs.  Let me begin by acknowledging a bias; I love dogs.  There seems little doubt regarding the utility of these animals in search and rescue, body recovery, and even sniffing contraband and explosives.  I want to be clear that this is not an attempt to diminish the importance and the role of these dogs in many of the activities they engage in.  Regardless of their error rates or even false positives, the assistance provided by these animals can be invaluable.

So what's the issue?

Nate Silver, a sports statistician, made waves when he accurately projected the results of the presidential election in 2008.  So a few days go when he predicted that President Obama was 75% likely to win when polls only showed the candidates were about even, it set atwitter those people who think statistical models of polls are meaningful.  They were vindicated, the age of scientific projections had arrived, in a baseball cap.

They thought that because they don't understands polls or statistical models.

An experimental device converts kinetic energy from beating hearts into electricity than can power a pacemaker, meaning the chance for no more batteries in the future, according to a talk at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2012.

The study is preliminary but a piezoelectric approach is promising for pacemakers because they require only small amounts of power to operate. Batteries must be replaced every five to seven years, which is costly and inconvenient.  Piezoelectricity might also power other implantable cardiac devices like defibrillators, which also have minimal energy needs.

Alan Guth, the discoverer of cosmic inflation, gave a talk at MIT on November 1, which convinced me, a natural skeptic about these issues, that the multiverse may very well exist. Two routes to the multiverse were never to my liking.

One is "Many Worlds," Hugh Everett IIIs idea that quantum events whose wave functions seem to "collapse" in our world to yield specific measurements actually never collapse but realize all other characteristics implicit in their wave functions in "other universes." Every time something happens here--of all the very large number of possibilities--all the rest of them happen in other universes.

In a conversation at an expo at Duke University last week, an executive with Oracle and I discussed my new project on sustainability and synthetic biology. He curiously asked if I made monsters. Honestly, I was not aware that profession even existed.

Clearly, there is a need for more education on this emerging technology. Books on synthetic biology are rare which is unfortunate. In order to fill that void, scientists and writers are providing the needed discussions to supplement the existing highly technical articles. In Rob Carlson’s Biology is Technology (2010), he argues biology has long been a technology. In Revolutions, released earlier this year, based on philosophical and historical discussions I argue that synthetic biology is the logical extension of genomics.

In 2008, I was as excited as anyone about the chance to correct some public relations mistakes made by the Bush administration in the nascent years of blogging.  Obviously some of the 'Republicans are anti-science' stuff was because when you are far left, even the middle looks like the right, but Republicans had done no favors to themselves by 'taking the bait' on topics like hESC research.  What had been a reasonable, bipartisan position on human embryonic stem cells in 2001 (traditional conservatives were actually all for it, more religious types among both Democrats and Republicans were not) became a simple partisan divide when it was revisited two more times and Bush shot it down despite Republicans overall being in favor of it.
 

We're not that special, says new research led by the Centre for Star and Planet Formation at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen.

About 4.567 billion years ago, our solar system's planets spawned from an expansive disc of gas and dust rotating around the sun. While similar processes are witnessed in younger solar systems throughout the Milky Way, the formative stages of our own solar system were believed to have taken twice as long to occur. It turns out that is not the case, according to a new paper.

Well here's an interesting development.  Mandatory labeling of GMOs (genetically modified organisms), the subject of CA Prop 37, has opened a rift between two of my favorite organizations.  The AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) recently released a statement opposing mandatory GMO labeling, while the UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists), remains firmly in favor.  The AAAS says mandatory labeling is reserved for potential dangers, but genetic engineering is as safe as conventional breeding.