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Huygens Didn't Land On Titan With A Splat - And Why That Is Scientifically Important

Huygens Didn't Land On Titan With A Splat - And Why That Is Scientifically Important

Oct 12 2012 | comment(s)

In January, 2005, ESA’s Huygens probe bounced, slid and wobbled its way to rest for 10 seconds after touching down on Saturn’s moon, Titan. As you can imagine, that tells scientists quite a bit about the nature of that moon’s surface.

They reconstructed the chain of events by analyzing data from a variety of instruments that were active during the impact, in particular changes in the acceleration experienced by the probe. The instrument data were compared with results from computer simulations and a drop test using a model of Huygens designed to replicate the landing and the analysis revealed that, on first contact with Titan’s surface, Huygens dug a hole 12 cm deep before bouncing out onto a flat surface.
Oral Health: In Mouth Microbiology, Nurture Triumphs Over Nature

Oral Health: In Mouth Microbiology, Nurture Triumphs Over Nature

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

Unless you are a microbiologist, you probably don't want to think about all of the things that are happening in your mouth right now. 

One thing you share with microbiologists is incomplete knowledge regarding what determines the specific types of microorganisms that live there. Is it genes that decide who lives in your microbial village, or your environment? In a new paper, researchers contend that environment plays a much larger role in determining oral microbiota than biology, a finding that sheds new light on a major factor in oral health.
Pulsars Could Cut Out The Middle Man For Interstellar Travel

Pulsars Could Cut Out The Middle Man For Interstellar Travel

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

Is it feasible to use dead stars to navigate spacecraft in deep space? Long-term space travel may be a pipe dream outside science fiction math but people inside science are at least thinking about how to make navigation possible. 
Quantum Effects Get Hot When Chemistry Gets Cold

Quantum Effects Get Hot When Chemistry Gets Cold

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

When temperatures get low, close to absolute zero, some chemical reactions still occur at a much higher rate than classical chemistry says they should – in that extreme chill, quantum effects enter the picture. Researchers have now confirmed this experimentally, providing insight into processes in the intriguing quantum world in which particles act as waves and perhaps also explaining how chemical reactions occur in the vast frigid regions of interstellar space.

What Is Natural Anyway?

What Is Natural Anyway?

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

It is clear from many discussions that there is a split between things people consider to be "natural" versus those that are the products of technology, or man-made.  Obviously no one would consider a computer to be natural, nor would anyone suggest that a tree is man-made.  These differences are intuitive.
Why Crowdsourcing Cannot Be Fixed

Why Crowdsourcing Cannot Be Fixed

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

Researchers from the University of Southampton have published a study in which they argue that crowdsourcing information can be improved through use of incentives.  In "Making crowdsourcing more reliable" Dr Victor Naroditskiy and Professor Nick Jennings and others propose to incentivize crowdsourcing tasks to improve the verification of credible contributors.
Karaoke Anxiety - An Exploration

Karaoke Anxiety - An Exploration

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

Is karaoke a passing fad? Kevin Brown PhD. Associate Professor of Theatre History, Theory, Criticism, Performance Studies, New Media, Non-Western Theatre, and Popular Culture at the University of Missouri, US. believes not. For his doctoral dissertation, he conducted a two-year ethnographic study of karaoke in America, a portion of which is: ‘Liveness Anxiety: Karaoke and the Performance of Class‘, and is published in Vol. 1, Issue 2, of the academic journal Popular Entertainment Studies.

“It is very tempting to dismiss karaoke as a passing fad.”

explains the professor.

Acknowledged!

Acknowledged!

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

This is just to report that I feel greatly honoured to be cited on top of the acknowledgements section of the new paper by Dimitri Nanopoulos and colleagues.

I hope I will be able to review the paper for you here soon. The title ("Primordial Synthesis: F-SU(5) SUSY Multijets, 140-150 GeV LSP, Proton and Rare Decays, 125 GeV Higgs Boson, and WMAP7") promises a lot...

Below is a clip of the "acknowledgement" of my contribution (just a very pleasant chat with Dimitri in Athens last August, and little more).



Left, Right? Science Shouldn't Be Worried Either Way

Left, Right? Science Shouldn't Be Worried Either Way

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

The biggest feel-good fallacy perpetuated by some in science media today is that "the right", whoever they are, is anti-science, while "the left", whoever they are, is pro-science. 

It's exactly the opposite.  The right historically has been more pro-science than anyone since World War II, they just recently adopted more positions labeled anti-science as science academia skewed left. 40 years ago conservatives were the most pro-science of any group and 40 years ago there was also political parity in science academia; science was a politically agnostic endeavor for the common good, only the humanities had been hijacked by partisans.
CMS Vs ATLAS On Dijet Resonances: Who Wins ?

CMS Vs ATLAS On Dijet Resonances: Who Wins ?

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

Two papers describing results of searches for high-mass resonances decaying into jet pairs have appeared on the arxiv this week. They are authored by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations, and they both report lower limits on the mass of hypothetical particles predicted by several new physics signatures. Both collaborations base their results on the analysis of their full 2011 datasets.
Did Body Hair Evolve To Warm Or Cool Animals?

Did Body Hair Evolve To Warm Or Cool Animals?

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

Body hair in mammals is typically thought to have evolved to keep us warm in colder prehistoric periods but in elephants it may do the opposite.  A new study contends epidermal hair may have evolved to help the animals keep cool in the hot regions they live in.

Low surface densities of hair can help dissipate heat but the biological and evolutionary significance of sparse skin hair is not well known. The authors of the new paper studied the effects of skin hair densities in Asian and African elephants on thermoregulation in these animals, and concluded that elephant skin hair significantly enhances their capacity to keep cool under different scenarios like higher daytime temperatures or less windy days. 
How cells in different parts of living organisms can react differently to external stimulation

How cells in different parts of living organisms can react differently to external stimulation

Oct 11 2012 | comment(s)

The Human body is a fine-tuned system of interactions between billions of cells and understanding molecular processes in biological systems of humans and animals has been a challenging task.
 At cellular level each cell has tiny receptors that enable it to sense its environment, so it can adapt to new situations. “Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka are awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family of such receptors: G-protein–coupled receptors”. (Quoted from The Royal Swedish Academy of SciencesPRESS RELEASE2012-10-10).
Synthetic Biology Circuits Get Their Most Complicated Version Yet

Synthetic Biology Circuits Get Their Most Complicated Version Yet

Oct 10 2012 | comment(s)

Synthetic biology uses genes as interchangeable parts to design cellular circuits that can perform new functions, such as sensing environmental conditions. But their complexity is limited by a critical bottleneck: the difficulty in assembling genetic components that don't interfere with each other.

Unlike electronic circuits on a silicon chip, biological circuits inside a cell cannot be physically isolated from one another. Because all the cellular machinery for reading genes and synthesizing proteins is jumbled together, researchers have to be careful that proteins that control one part of their synthetic circuit don't hinder other parts of the circuit.
Fish Version Of Oxytocin Drives Their Social Behavior, Says Study

Fish Version Of Oxytocin Drives Their Social Behavior, Says Study

Oct 10 2012 | comment(s)

Researchers say that a form of oxytocin — the hormone correlated with human love — has a similar effect on fish, suggesting it is a key regulator of social behavior that has evolved and endured since ancient times.

The findings may help answer an evolutionary psychology question: why do some species develop complex social behaviors while others spend much of their lives alone? To find some clues, they examined the cichlid fish Neolamprologus pulcher, a highly social species found in Lake Tanganyika in Africa. These cichlids are unusual because they form permanent hierarchical social groups made up of a dominant breeding pair and many helpers that look after the young and defend their territory.
Medicare Recipients Overspend By Not Choosing The Cheapest Prescription Plan

Medicare Recipients Overspend By Not Choosing The Cheapest Prescription Plan

Oct 10 2012 | comment(s)

Implemented in 2006, Medicare prescription drug benefit (Part D) spent $65.8 billion for prescription drugs in 2011, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But Medicare beneficiaries are overpaying by hundreds of dollars annually because of difficulties selecting the ideal prescription drug plan for their medical needs, an investigation by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health reveals.  Their work also could be useful in designing health insurance exchanges, which are state-regulated organizations created under the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") to offer standardized health care plans.
Space Travel: Pioneer Anomaly Solved?

Space Travel: Pioneer Anomaly Solved?

Oct 10 2012 | comment(s)

The 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating human expansion into other star systems, has some crucial hurdles to overcome. Basically, interstellar travel will depend upon extremely precise measurements of every factor involved in the mission, which isn't possible yet.  But a University of Missouri researcher thinks he has found the solution to a puzzle that has stumped astrophysicists for decades.
G-Protein-Coupled Receptors Researchers Get Nobel Prize In Chemistry

G-Protein-Coupled Receptors Researchers Get Nobel Prize In Chemistry

Oct 10 2012 | comment(s)

 Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  As frequently happens in modern times, they are not chemists.  

Lefkowitz is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina while Kobilka is a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.  They received their award for their discoveries related to G-protein-coupled receptors. The human body has about 1,000 kinds of such receptors, structures on the surface of cells, which let the body respond to a wide variety of chemical signals, like adrenaline. Some receptors are in the nose, tongue and eyes, and let us sense smells, tastes and light.
Eternal Terror: 100 Million-Year-Old Spider Fossilized In Amber While Attacking A Wasp

Eternal Terror: 100 Million-Year-Old Spider Fossilized In Amber While Attacking A Wasp

Oct 10 2012 | comment(s)

Researchers have found what they say is the only fossil ever discovered of a spider attacking prey caught in its web – and it dates back 100 million years. 
Black Silicon Solar Cells Can Absorb Infrared Spectrum And Now Are A Whole Lot More Efficient

Black Silicon Solar Cells Can Absorb Infrared Spectrum And Now Are A Whole Lot More Efficient

Oct 10 2012 | comment(s)

Solar cells can convert up to three-quarters of the energy contained in the Sun‘s spectrum into electricity, yet the infrared spectrum is entirely lost in standard solar cells.

Around a quarter of the Sun’s spectrum is made up of infrared radiation which cannot be converted by standard solar cells; that heat radiation is lost. One way to overcome it is to use black silicon, a material that absorbs nearly all of the sunlight that hits it, including infrared radiation, and converts it into electricity. But how is this material produced?
Gambler Psychology: Near-Misses Are Frustrating Losses Rather Than Near-Wins

Gambler Psychology: Near-Misses Are Frustrating Losses Rather Than Near-Wins

Oct 10 2012 | comment(s)

Gamblers interpret near-misses as frustrating losses rather than near-wins, and that frustration stimulates the reward systems in the brain to promote continued gambling, which may contribute to addictive gambling behavior. 

Analyses to date have shown that near-misses support persistent gambling and activate brain areas that reinforce certain behaviors. If near-misses are seen as near-wins, then they should be pleasurable. If, however, near-misses are highly frustrating losses, then they should be unpleasant. Dixon and team set out to shed light on this debate.