Is The Universe A Computer Simulation? 

A totally cool article by the lovely and talented 

Cara Santa Maria, with the Huffington Post (who can be reached at

sciencecara@huffingtonpost.com)

Have you ever wondered whether all this--you, your life, the universe--is just a sophisticated computer simulation?

Martin Savage, a physicist at the University of Washington, thinks we can't discount the idea. In fact, he and two colleagues (Silas Beane and Zohreh Davoudi) published a paper in November 2012 exploring the possibility.

... it is the first time where you think, you know, you might result from just a piece of code, writing another piece of code, writing another piece of code. And then you do ask the question about the original simulator, if you like. And so if we are a simulation, we’re probably a simulation from our descendants, right? So, as our universe evolves and becomes more mature, then somebody in that universe launches a simulation to simulate where they came from....

to read the rest, click here

360 crime scene views - totally mathematical...

360 crime scene views - totally mathematical...

Crime scene forensics: How does it work?

Forensic evidence and the way it was gathered came under close scrutiny in the trial of Stephen Lawrence's killers.

Techniques and practices have developed significantly since 1993 and are now a key part of police investigations from the start.

The basic principle is "every contact leaves a trace" and specks of blood, fibres or fingerprints become silent witnesses against the criminal. Here, we examine forensic science from crime scene to courtroom.
 
For the rest of the story, read here: 

 

Welcome Back to School!

Welcome new and returning students to Block II! Hope you all had a good Fall Break, and are ready for your Biology, Biology Honors , and Forensic Science classes. Stop by my Blog here once a week or so to find science articles, images, and videos that I find interesting (and hopefully you will, too). 

If you leave a comment on the post, you get some extra credit. Either use your Google or Open ID account, or leave your name in the post so I know who to give the extra credit to.

For the first one, it's easy as pie. Just click on the comment link below this post, and leave your name, so I know you found the site. Get stoked for science, dudes!

Maggot DNA Identifies Corpse

Corpse identification is as much art as science. Sometimes no ID is possible and at other times creativity is required. 

In a recent case, where a badly charred body could not be identified due to the damage, DNA was extracted from the GI tracks of the fly maggots that had populated the corpse. U

sing the STR technique, DNA from the maggots was compared with DNA from the suspected victim’s father and a paternity-type match was made, proving the ID of the corpse to an accuracy of 99.685% according to the authors of the study.

This is the first time this technique has been used in this manner.

Happy Birthday, Neil deGrasse Tyson: Intelligent Design and the Philosophy of Ignorance

By: Maria Popova
 

Why even Newton was susceptible to cognitive cop-outs.

Today marks the 54th birthday of the inimitable Neil deGrass Tyson, who blends the “Great Explainer” quality of Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan’s penchant of the poetry of the cosmos with a brand of eloquence all his own. He’s previously made a political case for space exploration, showed us why we’re wired for science, and bantered with Colbert about scientific literacy, education, and the universe. In this short excerpt from a longer lecture, Tyson exposes intelligent design as a kind of dead-end cop-out that even some of history’s greatest intellectuals resorted to when stumped — including Sir Isaac Newton, who invented calculus at the tender age of 25.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQucyuKsrOE&feature=colike
 

Newly Found Living Mammoth Cells Raise Cloning Possibility

 A Russian university says scientists have discovered frozen woolly mammoth fragments that may contain living cells deep in Siberia, bringing closer the possibility of cloning the extinct animal.

The North-East Federal Univ. says in a statement that an international team had discovered mammoth hair, soft tissues and bone marrow at a depth of 328 feet (100 meters) during a summer expedition.

Expedition chief Semyon Grigoryev says a group of Korean scientists with the team had set a goal of finding living cells in the hope of cloning a mammoth. Scientists have previously found bodies and fragments, but not living cells.

Grigoryev told online newspaper Vzglyad it would take months of lab research to determine whether they have indeed found the cells.

Wooly mammoths are thought to have died out 10,000 years ago.

Welcome Back to School!

Welcome new and returning students to Block I! Hope you all had a good Summer Break, and are ready for your Biology and Biology Honors classes. Stop by my Blog here once a week or so to find science articles, images, and videos that I find interesting (and hopefully you will, too). 

If you leave a comment on the post, you get some extra credit. Either use your Google or Open ID account, or leave your name in the post so I know who to give the extra credit to.

For the first one, it's easy as pie. Just click on the comment link below this post, and leave your name, so I know you found the site. Get stoked for science, dudes!

 

Make Sure You Stay on the Right Path...

Fight For Space

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye make the case for NASA’s future in Fight For Space

Do you miss the days of space shuttle launches? Do you want to see humans go back to the Moon, and even explore Mars, in your lifetime? Paul Hildebrandt does too. So he's initiated a Kickstarter campaign to create Fight For Space: Exploring the Future of Manned Spaceflight, a documentary with a higher aim than just getting viewers.

Read the rest of the article here, and watch the video, it's cool!

Animals with Misleading Names

The International Space Station, set to the soundtrack of Sunshine.

http://io9.com/5927869/the-international-space-station-set-to-the-soundtrack-of-sunshine

I Think...

What a joy it is to be alive, and wonder if I will ever leap inward to the root of this flesh, and know myself as I truly am...

This is where I'm at now, kiddos...

Hope you all are having a good Summer!

Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test

Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test

One hundred years after Alan Turing was born, his eponymous test remains an elusive benchmark for artificial intelligence. Now, for the first time in decades, it’s possible to imagine a machine making the grade.

Turing was one of the 20th century’s great mathematicians, a conceptual architect of modern computing whose codebreaking played a decisive part in World War II. His test, described in a seminal dawn-of-the-computer-age paper, was deceptively simple: If a machine could pass for human in conversation, the machine could be considered intelligent.

Artificial intelligences are now ubiquitous, from GPS navigation systems and Google algorithms to automated customer service and Apple’s Siri, to say nothing of Deep Blue and Watson — but no machine has met Turing’s standard. The quest to do so, however, and the lines of research inspired by the general challenge of modeling human thought, have profoundly influenced both computer and cognitive science.

check out the rest of the story here...

Study: Global temperatures could rise 5 degrees by 2050

Study: Global temperatures could rise 5 degrees by 2050

As the USA simmers through its hottest March on record — with more than 6,000 record high temperatures already set this month — a new study released Sunday shows that average global temperatures could climb 2.5 to 5.4 degrees by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated.

The study findings are based on the results of 10,000 computer model simulations of future weather overseen by researchers at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

"These are the first results to suggest that the higher warming scenario could be plausible," says study lead author Dan Rowlands of Oxford.

It is a faster rate of warming than most other models predict.

read the rest here

Forensic scientists study mystery of skeleton

Thought to be outlaw killed by physician, onetime Grand Forks mayor
Dr. Henry Wheeler, a prominent pioneer physician in Grand Forks and the city’s onetime mayor, always claimed he owned the skeleton of an outlaw that he killed named McClelland “Clell” Miller. 

James Cameron becomes first solo explorer to reach the deepest point of ocean

 

 

Welcome Back Returning South Pointe Students!

 

You've made it, dudes and dudettes, Block IV is here! Just a reminder, on this blog you'll find links to interesting science stuff. Click on something, check it out, and come back and leave a comment to earn extra credit. Click on the comment button below, or email me at jgiacobbe_southpointe@cox.net Make sure you include your name in the comment, or I won't know who gets the extra credit (25 points each time you have a meaningful comment).

For the 1st one this block, it's a piece of cake. Just leave a comment showing me you've been to the blog, and you get the credit. Capisce? (that's Italian for "do you understand me?")

Hi Ho!   JG

Oh, here's a cool pic to look at...  

Well, the 3rd Block party is over. Hope you enjoyed the show, and that you'll come back for more next block!

Peace. JG

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. (Bilbo Baggins)

10 Futuristic Materials

1. Aerogel
 

Aerogel protecting crayons from a blowtorch.
 

This tiny block of transparent aerogel is supporting a brick weighing 2.5 kg. The aerogel’s density is 0.1 g/cm³.
Aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records, more than any other material. Sometimes called “frozen smoke”, aerogel is made by the supercritical drying of liquid gels of alumina, chromia, tin oxide, or carbon. It’s 99.8% empty space, which makes it look semi-transparent. Aerogel is a fantastic insulator — if you had a shield of aerogel, you could easily defend yourself from a flamethrower. It stops cold, it stops heat. You could build a warm dome on the Moon. Aerogels have unbelievable surface area in their internal fractal structures — cubes of aerogel just an inch on a side may have an internal surface area equivalent to a football field. Despite its low density, aerogel has been looked into as a component of military armor because of its insulating properties.
 
 
2. Carbon nanotubes
 
Carbon nanotubes are long chains of carbon held together by the strongest bond in all chemistry, the sacred sp₂ bond, even stronger than the sp3 bonds that hold together diamond. Carbon nanotubes have numerous remarkable physical properties, including ballistic electron transport (making them ideal for electronics) and so much tensile strength that they are the only substance that could be used to build a space elevator. The specific strength of carbon nanotubes is 48,000 kN·m/kg, the best of known materials, compared to high-carbon steel’s 154 kN·/kg. That’s 300 times stronger than steel. You could build towers hundreds of kilometers high with it.
 
 
3. Metamaterials
 
“Metamaterial” refers to any material that gains its properties from structure rather than composition. Metamaterials have been used to create microwave invisibility cloaks, 2D invisibility cloaks, and materials with other unusual optical properties. Mother-of-pearl gets its rainbow color from metamaterials of biological origin. Some metamaterials have a negative refractive index, an optical property that may be used to create “Superlenses” which resolve features smaller than the wavelength of light used to image them! This technology is called subwavelength imaging. Metamaterials would used in phased array optics, a technology that could render perfect holograms on a 2D display. These holograms would be so perfect that you could be standing 6 inches from the screen, looking into the “distance” with binoculars, and not even notice it’s a hologram.
 
 
4. Bulk diamond
 
We’re starting to lay down thick layers of diamond in CVD machines, hinting towards a future of bulk diamond machinery. Diamond is an ideal construction material — it’s immensely strong, light, made out of the widely available element carbon, nearly complete thermal conductivity, and has among the highest melting and boiling points of all materials. By introducing trace impurities, you can make a diamond practically any color you want. Imagine a jet, with hundreds of thousands of moving parts made of fine-tuned diamond machinery. Such a craft would be more powerful than today’s best fighter planes in the way an F-22 is better than the Red Baron’s Fokker Dr.1.
 
 
5. Bulk fullerenes
 
Diamonds may be strong, but aggregated diamond nanorods (what I call amorphous fullerene) are stronger. Amorphous fullerene has a isothermal bulk modulus of 491 gigapascals (GPa), compared to diamond’s 442 GPa. As we see in the image, the nanoscale structure of the fullerene gives it a beautiful iridescent appearance. Fullerenes can be made substantially stronger than diamond, but for greater energy cost. After a “Diamond Age” we may eventually transition to a “Fullerene Age” as our technology gets even more sophisticated.
 
 
6. Amorphous metal
 
Amorphous metals, also called metallic glasses, consist of metal with a disordered atomic structure. They can be twice as strong as steel. Because of their disordered structure, they can disperse impact energy more effectively than a metal crystal, which has points of weakness. Amorphous metals are made by quickly cooling molten metal before it has a chance to align itself in a crystal pattern. Amorphous metals may the military’s next generation of armor, before they adopt diamondoid armor in mid-century. On the green side of things, amorphous metals have electronic properties that improve the efficiency of power grids by as much as 40%, saving us thousands of tons of fossil fuel emissions.
 
 
7. Superalloys
 
A superalloy is a generic term for a metal that can operate at very high temperatures, up to about 2000 °F (1100 °C). They are popular for use in the superhot turbine areas of jet engines. They are used for more advanced oxygen-breathing designs, such as the ramjet and scramjet. When we’re flying through the sky in hypersonic craft, we’ll have superalloys to thank for it.
 
 
8. Metal foam
 
Metal foam is what you get when you add a foaming agent, powdered titanium hydride, to molten aluminum, then let it cool. The result is a very strong substance that is relatively light, with 75–95% empty space. Because of its favorable strength-to-weight ratio, metal foams have been proposed as a construction material for space colonies. Some metal forms are so light that they float on water, which would make them excellent for building floating cities, like those analyzed by Marshall T. Savage in one of my favorite books, The Millennial Project.
 
 
9. Transparent alumina
 
Transparent alumina is three times stronger than steel and transparent. The number of applications for this are huge. Imagine an entire skyscraper or arcology made largely of transparent steel. The skylines of the future could look more like a series of floating black dots (opaque private rooms) rather than the monoliths of today. A huge space station made of transparent alumina could cruise in low Earth orbit without being a creepy black dot when it passes overhead. And hey… transparent swords!
 
 
10. E-textiles
 
If you meet up and talk to me in 2020, I’ll likely be covered in electronic textiles. Why carry some electronic gadget you can easily lose when we can just wear our computers? We’ll develop clothing that can constantly project the video of our choosing (unless it turns out being so annoying that we ban it). Imagine wearing a robe covered in a display that actually projects the night sky in realtime. Imagine talking to people over the “phone” just by making a hand gesture and activating electronics in your lapel, then merely thinking about what you want to say (thought-to-speech interfaces). The possibilities of e-textiles are limitless.

U.S. Navy Has Trained Dolphins Ready if Iran Mines the Strait of Hormuz

CNN reports that the U.S. Navy plans to involve its trained dolphins in the Strait of Hormuz if Iran mines it. The trained dolphins are very real. They have been trained to mark or locate sea mines. They are described on this page of the U.S. Navy's website as the MK4 Marine Mammal System.

The MK 4 MMS uses dolphins for detecting and/or marking the location of sea mines that are tethered off the ocean bottom. These deep-water mines are easy targets for the dolphin's highly effective echolocation. The MK 4 MMS offers reliable and effective mine detection, classification, and marking capabilities in areas that are highly cluttered or where rough seabed, high marine growth, and other complex acoustic conditions hamper the performance of Navy hardware systems.

The Navy has also trained dolphins to find mines sitting on the ocean bottom or buried in sediment. The can also help identify safe corridors for the initial landing of troops during a land invasion.

If Iran decides to mine the Strait of Hormuz to slow the transport of oil then the U.S. Navy may put some of its trained dolphins to work to locate the mines so they can be destroyed or deactivated. Iran recently threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz oil route, but Iran makes a lot of threats it never acts on.

CNN says the U.S. Navy has been training the dolphins for years. Fish rewards, particularly sardines, are used to train the dolphins. The dolphins would be airlifted to the Strait of Hormuz if they are needed. Take a look at a video here:

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov graffiti in a park in the Pignetto area of Rome (!)

(if you don't know who he was, look him up!)

WTF Wikipedia, how am I gonna do my homework?”

What's the Big Idea?

Wikipedia’s call to “imagine you live in a world without free knowledge” may have been dramatic, but it was also effective: after 24 hours of living without the history of everything at your fingertips, you probably got the point. Journalists compared the shutdown of hundreds of websites yesterday to the loss of a digital limb. "This is what happens when you make the Internet mad," declared an editorial in the Washington Post. One student tweeted, “Wtf Wikipedia, how am I gonna do my homework?”

Clearly, we like our encyclopedias like we like our news: infinite, free, and constantly accessible. The message behind the Internet blackout was that two controversial pieces of anti-piracy legislation, SOPA and PIPA, could put an end to all that, by shifting the responsibility for policing online copyright violations from content creators to internet service providers. 

The most contentious provision of SOPA mandates that "a service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order." Copyright holders would be able to obtain a court order against websites accused of "enabling or facilitating" infractions.

This amounts to online censorship, according to the community - comprised of monoliths like Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia as well as startups and venture capitalists - that has formed in opposition to the legislation. But is the controversy really about free speech, or is it just another showdown between rich and powerful Hollywood, and even richer and more powerful Silicon Valley? How will SOPA and PIPA affect you and me? Big Think put the question to VC Brad Burnham, an outspoken critic of the legislation. 

"A lot of people have positioned this debate as just a battle between the tech industry and the content industry, and it’s an insiders’ game - it’s a bunch of rich guys playing around with each other," he said. "I don’t think that’s the case. What we’re talking about is the freedom to innovate. That’s a very profound and important thing... if you think about the problems that we’re trying to solve, the internet isn’t the problem. The internet is the solution." Established web companies like Google and Yahoo have the money to hire lawyers to make their case in court, says Burnham. It's web startups and the people who use them that will suffer.

Read the rest of the article here

Forensics lesson makes an impression on Pleasantville students

PLEASANTVILLE – Blood spatter analysis, footprint and bite mark impressions, drug testing, hair and fiber analysis and fingerprinting are just some of the topics explored in an elective course being offered at Pleasantville High School, now in its second year.

Taught by Darlyne de Haan, a former state forensic scientist, the course is aimed at providing students with an introduction into forensic science as a career track. “This is a huge, growing field,” de Haan said. “It’s a comprehensive science. There are all sorts of options besides traditional law enforcement: psychology for profiling, statistics and forensic accounting.”

to read more, click here

Welcome Back New & Returning South Pointe Students!

Welcome to Block III. On this blog you'll find links to interesting science stuff. Click on something, check it out, and come back and leave a comment to earn extra credit. Click on the comment button below, or email me at jgiacobbe_southpointe@cox.net Make sure you include your name in the comment, or I won't know who gets the extra credit (10 points each time you have a meaningful comment).

For the 1st one this block, it's a piece of cake. Just leave a comment showing me you've been to the blog, and you get the credit. Were you paying attention? Just leave a frakin' comment with your frakin' name and you get some extra credit points. Capisce? (that's Italian for "do you understand me?")

Check back regularly, at least once a week, for more extra credit options.

Hi Ho!   JG

The 5 Most Mind-Blowingly Huge Machines Built By Science

The 5 Most Mind-Blowingly Huge Machines Built By Science

Christopher Hitchens Is Hailed by Stephen Fry as a Man of Style and Wit

Actor and author Stephen Fry salutes Christopher Hitchens as an inspiring polemicist but also as an abiding fan of P. G. Wodehouse and a magnificent writer. 

 

When a dog isn't a dog

When a dog isn't a dog
By CNN National Security Producer Jennifer Rizzo

When an insurgent rocket attack badly injured Cpl. Dustin Lee while he was on patrol in Iraq, his shrapnel-impaled partner, Lex, picked himself up to lie over Lee - an effort to protect him.

"He knew Dustin was injured," said Lee's mom, Rachel. Lex was his bomb-sniffing dog.

Lee didn't survive his injuries, but Lex did - and became a part of the Lee family when Rachel adopted him.

"When Dustin was killed, one of the first things I asked about was Lex, because of their camaraderie. They depended on each other"

Lex, a German shepherd, served in the Marines as a military working dog.