Sorry I've been absent for a while. (I hope you missed me!) Here's one thing that's been keeping me busy:
New York State would achieve significant cost savings, while also creating opportunities to generate revenue with state owned assets by shifting to Real Time Pricing. Furthermore, the state may act as an innovator by helping to mature developing technologies which would facilitate the adoption of real time pricing for residential constituents. It is believed that the complete migration of all New York customers to RTP is inevitable in the future. Real-time pricing (RTP) is a rate class where customers pay for the electricity they consume based on wholesale hourly market prices.
It all started back in the olden-days of mid-2007 with GalaxyZoo: the ultimate in online, interactive citizen science where anyone with eyes, an Internet connection, patience, and an appreciation for beautiful galactic images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey could make a reasonably important contribution to astrophysical scientific research.
Wrestlers are taught to ignore an opponent's eyes and instead watch his waist - nothing much is happening that his waist won't be involved in whereas eyes can be misleading. That means wrestlers are conservatives, according to new research coming out in Attention, Perception&Psychophysics.
Progressives follow eye movements more than conservatives, the authors contend. That means that progressives (also, liberals, if you don't know what the word liberal means) and conservatives quite literally do not see the world in the same way. The researchers measured reaction to 'gaze cues' - the tendency to shift attention based on another person's eye movements. Essentially, they wanted to find out who looked more at what distracted someone else.
Scientists writing in Nature Genetics have produced the full genome of a wild strawberry plant.
The woodland strawberry - Fragaria vesca - is closely related to garden-variety cultivated strawberry and this berry contains large amounts of anti-oxidants (mainly tannins, the substances that give wine their astringency), as well as vitamins A, C and B12 and minerals – potassium, calcium and magnesium. In addition, the strawberry fruit is rich in substances for flavor and aroma.
The production of high quality chocolate will benefit from the recent sequencing and assembly of the chocolate tree genome - Theobroma cacao - considered by chocolate experts to produce the world's finest chocolate. The Maya domesticated this variety of Theobroma cacao, 'Criollo', about 3,000 years ago in Central America and it is among the oldest domesticated tree crops, though today many growers prefer to grow hybrid cacao trees ('Trinitario') that produce chocolate of lower quality but are more resistant to disease.
The old discussion about how an airplane, that is many tons of steel, can keep staying supported in mere air, is a perfect example for how discussions way too often polarize into two camps with both sides being wrong. Little headway is possible once any attempt at resolution is portrayed as either a dangerous accommodating that leads onto a slippery slope toward defeat, or worse belonging to the other, the evil side. There are too many such issues, not only in politics or largely yet to be explored scientific fields like climatology. Even in known physics, for instance in special relativity, there are these polarized debates where both sides are wrong. The theories are well known and their domains of applicability are well delimited by both mathematics and experiment.
New findings indicate that weight gain of infants is influenced by not just formula versus breast feeding but also the type of formula the infant is consuming, which the researchers say could have implications related to the infant's risk for the development of obesity, diabetes and other diseases later in life.
Formula-fed babies gain more weight than breast-fed babies but the study set out to determine differences between formula types. Most infant formulas are cow's milk-based and alternatives include soy-based and protein hydrolysate-based formulas. Protein hydrolysate formulas contain pre-digested proteins and typically are fed to infants who cannot tolerate the intact proteins in other formulas.
In his book "Everything's Relative - And Other Fables From Science And Technology" Tony Rothman writes:
"[The term] 'special relativity' is probably the greatest misnomer in the history of science"
I wholeheartedly agree. Amongst all scientific terms, the single word 'relativity' stands out as absolute record holder for triggering an astonishing amount of utter nonsense.
Betting a grand on the existence or not of new physics is cool, but one does not need to be that daring (or to be that daring every other day) to enjoy the game of making predictions for what the fundamental research in experimental particle physics will discover or measure in a future close enough that we can reasonably expect to experience ourselves. So here I am, at the end of this eventful 2010, to look forward rather than backward, with no additional grand to invest but some insight to use, some reputation to waste, and a bit of humour to stuff between the lines.
