A recent blog on an Australian news site on inspiration porn has had me taking notice of the images that come across my facebook feed, had me looking at the content and the messages that different people take away from the photos of disabled persons smiling, running, laughing, being.
Stella Young, in her piece, takes away a clear message from what she has called (she's not the first to term it so) inspiration porn:
No matter how much spin you hear and read from highly-paid lobbyists and clueless advocates, green energy is not viable. It will be, though science would get there faster if the Department of Energy would stop throwing money at solar panel companies and instead throw it at basic research, like battery technology.
After cost and efficiency, storage is the biggest obstacle preventing widespread use of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. The ability to store energy when it is produced is an essential waypoint on the road to turning alternative energy into regular energy. The current U.S. energy grid system is used predominantly for distributing energy and allows little flexibility for storage of excess or a rapid dispersal on short notice.
Researchers have resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli(E. coli) - the bacterium has now been growing for more than 1,000 generations, which has given the scientists a front row seat to observe descent with modification in action.
It's paleo-experimental evolution.
'Got less milk?" is unlikely to resonate with consumers in the heartland, but it may be so, says a new projection.
The group behind the model found that a possible decline in milk production due to climate change will vary across the U.S., since there are significant differences in humidity and will be impacted by how much the temperature swings between night and day across the country. The humidity and hot nights make the Southeast the most unfriendly place in the US for dairy cows right now. That's not new, scientists and obviously farmers have long known about and studied the impact of heat stress on cows' milk production.
Spaceflight is tough on humans, due to weightlessness and radiation exposure. But if it bothers the nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, they aren't talking.
Researchers writing in Nature Scientific Reports say they were interested in seeing how C. elegans reacts to living in space because it was the first multicellular life form to have its full genetic structure mapped. They found the astronaut worms showed less toxic proteins in their muscles than if they had stayed on Earth. Further investigation revealed that seven genes were less active in space; living on the Space Station led to certain genes not functioning normally.
For not being a planet, according to 2 percent of astronomers, Pluto sure has a lot of moons.
Now it has one more, joining Charon, which was discovered in 1978, Nix and Hydra, discovered in 2006, and P4, found in 2011.
Pluto’s new-found moon, provisionally designated S/2012 (134340) 1, or P5, is tiny and only visible as a speck of light in Hubble images, so it is estimated to be irregular in shape and between 10 and 25 kilometers across. It is in a 95,000 kilometer-diameter circular orbit and assumed to lie in the same plane as Pluto’s other known moons.
Want to get into a bar fight at a physics conference? Argue that quantum mechanics is the best way to predict outcomes. Or argue the opposite.
A new paper argues that quantum mechanics is close to optimal in terms of its predictive power but even if all the information is available, the outcomes of certain quantum mechanics experiments generally can't be predicted perfectly beforehand. Optimal but unpredictable? The best but often not good enough? Quantum mechanics is a confusing dichotomy, basically the LeBron James of the physics world.
Dark galaxies, theorized but unobserved, may have been spotted.
Dark galaxies are essentially gas-rich galaxies in the early Universe that are very inefficient at forming stars and astronomers think they have detected these elusive objects by observing them glowing as they are illuminated by a quasar. They are predicted by theories of galaxy formation and are thought to be the building blocks of today’s bright, star-filled galaxies. They may have fed large galaxies with much of the gas that later formed into the stars that exist today.
The path of the LHC experiments to the successful observation of a Higgs boson has not been the smoothest I could think of, with delays in construction, incidents, and the like; but we are finally there. And now, with over 10/fb of data fully analyzed and presented at ICHEP, we can take stock and draw the "summer 2012" picture on existing and non-existing subnuclear entities, the non-existing ones notably including SUSY particles and other new physics candidates which are periodically evoked by theorists to mend the shortcomings of the standard model.
