I just finished reading an interesting book review by physicist Martin Blume in a recent issue of Nature. Blume was reviewing Eugenie Samuel Reich’s provocative book “Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World,” and the whole thing prompted some further thoughts about scientific misconduct, objectivity, and the peer review system that is crucial to the advancement of science.
Reich’s book is apparently very well researched (I take Blume’s word for it, since material physics is not my field), but she draws exactly the wrong conclusion from the case study she so thoroughly investigated.
In case you've been living under a rock, you probably know that Monday is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I don't remember seeing it on TV when I was a lad, though I am told I did (I do remember watching the live liftoff of Apollo 17, since Kennedy is about an hour drive from my boyhood home in Florida and we went to that one) but most everyone middle aged and older will - it remains the most watched program in history(1).
I'm sure that you don't seriously think I would tell you how to destroy all of the science community - do you?
Anyway, what I wanted to explain in simple terms to you is the four things that everybody seems to get wrong and drive scientists mad in the process. These are:
The Light year is a distance not a time
It makes sense that someone may think that: as it has the word year in it.
But, the light year is a measure of the distance light travels in one year. It is not a long period of time as it is often used in colloquial conversation. Understand?
If so; how many years are in a light year? None of course.
Georgia State University researchers are manipulating individual atoms in DNA and forming unique molecules in hopes of understanding the mechanisms of DNA replication and transcription, and perhaps leading to new treatments for diseases.
Chemistry and chemical biology Professor Zhen Huang and his lab were able, for the first time, to manipulate groups of molecules called methyl and phosphate groups in DNA that have been altered to contain selenium in order to bring them close enough together to form hydrogen bonds.
It isn't often that the government gets it right and the energy/climate change policies being jammed through Congress while there is no way to block them could be with us for a long time.
Unless the writing is completely legible and usually modern, even advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems give rise to transcription problems and provide results with many errors that need to be edited afterwards, a time-consuming process.
The Computational Perception and Learning Research Group in the Computer Languages and Systems Department at the Universitat Jaume I, in collaboration with the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, have developed a new assisted system for the transcription of written text called 'State', a transcription system that integrates a series of tools with which images can be processed in order to remove noise and clean up the original image.
Today's tale looks at whether ancient Sufi mystics predicted the current climate for science in the Western World. Some see science as an ivory tower pursuit, others as a way of achieving technological advancement, still others as a path to personal glory. But some of us see more.
A quick look at the top ScientificBlogging stories this week gives us titles seemingly ripped from summer blockbusters and beach reading. Shark Week, Chemistry of Love, Moral Lessons, the Indiana Jones Method of Science, Super Sexy.
A low-cost generator could be a boon for people in the world’s poorest countries. The Score project, led by The University of Nottingham, is developing a biomass-burning cooking stove which also converts heat into acoustic energy and then into electricity, all in one unit.
The £2 million Score project (Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity) has brought together experts from across the world to develop the biomass-powered generator. An affordable, versatile domestic appliance like Score aims to address the energy needs of rural communities in Africa and Asia, where access to power is extremely limited.
In the 150 years since the publication of Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species', despite consistent patterns of biodiversity identified over space, time, organism type and geographical region, there still remain two views of the process of 'speciation', the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise.
The first requires a physical barrier; a glacier, mountain or body of water that separates organisms, enabling groups to diverge until they become separate species. In the second scenario, an environment favors specific characteristics within a species, which encourages divergence as members fill different roles in an ecosystem.
Yesterday I posted a short article whose main purpose was to show a figure I had received from Sven Heinemeyer, a phenomenologist who specializes in the study of Minimal Supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model (MSSM).
Besides predicting a mirror copy of Standard Model (SM) particles, MSSM models are characterized by containing not just one, but five distinct Higgs bosons; over much of the space of possible parameters of these theories, one of the five Higgs bosons is quite similar to the one and only SM Higgs, so that one can discuss the SM Higgs and the lightest neutral scalar of the MSSM together without generating confusion.
