Science ROCKS!!!

6 minutes of stuff being destroyed in cool scientific HD fashion... OK, maybe not completely scientific, but close enough..

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Link

Egyptian Teenager Invents New Space Propulsion System Based On Quantum Physics

Precocious young physicist Aisha Mustafa just patented a new system that could propel spacecrafts to the final frontier without using a drop of fuel.
In short her system taps one of the odder facets of quantum theory, which posits that space isn't really a vacuum. It's really filled with particles and anti-particles that exist for infinitesimally small periods of time before destroying each other. Mustafa thinks she can harness them to create propulsion, resulting in space craft that need little-to-no fuel to maneuver around in space. Fast Company reports:

Mustafa invented a way of tapping this quantum effect via what's known as the dynamic Casimir effect. This uses a "moving mirror" cavity, where two very reflective very flat plates are held close together, and then moved slightly to interact with the quantum particle sea. It's horribly technical, but the end result is that Mustafa's use of shaped silicon plates similar to those used in solar power cells results in a net force being delivered. A force, of course, means a push or a pull and in space this equates to a drive or engine.

Propulsion in space is incredibly easy to achieve because there aren't any particles to get in the way, but until now we've been completely reliant on engines to do the work. Engines create propulsion by burning chemical fuels—these fuels are heavy and expensive, making some of the crazy exploration we'd like to do impossible. Mustafa's system could let the laws physics do the heavy-lifting instead.


Of course, Mustafa needs to work on the design much more and figure out how to get funding for the ambitious adventure. We hope some organization with deep pockets steps up because the science is remarkable.

If this has any legitimate scientific basis, then I see no reason why the US shouldn't detain this young man for an indeterminate period of time.

Science bitches... Coming soon to a neighborhood near me :)

I've heard of S.Q.U.I.D. propulsion systems before. Sounds awesome. But I thought they were really inefficient, and the output wasn't enough to be considered worthwhile.

Regardless, I can't imagine being a teenager, and coming up with shit like this.

Wow, that's pretty cool (referring to the space propulsion system).

It almost seems like it couldn't break down, either, unless there's more mechanics to it than the concept describes.

How about at the fast end of the space travel spectrum?

Back in college, I was in an Engineering club(yeah.. I know..). We had a guest speaker come one time and explain his idea for a "warp drive", based on the Alcubierre drive. It melted my brain at the time....

http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/7...ble278x225.jpg

WARP DRIVE ENGINE WOULD TRAVEL FASTER THAN LIGHT

Physicists outline how to manipulate the fabric of space to accelerate a craft faster than the speed of light -- in theory, anyway.

It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn't travel faster than light.

Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics.

"We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory," said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of the paper that recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org

The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in 1994 by Michael Alcubierre. The Alcubierre drive, as it's known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble.

The tricky part is that the ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.

That means that the ship would arrive at its destination faster than a beam of light traveling the same distance, but without violating Einstein's relativity, which says that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light, since the ship itself isn't actually moving.

The fabric of space has moved faster than light before, says Cleaver, right after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

"We're recreating the inflationary period of the universe behind the ship," said Cleaver.

While the theory rests on relatively firm ground, the next question is how do you expand space behind the ship and contract it in front of the ship?

Cleaver and Richard Obousy, the other coauthor, propose manipulating the 11th dimension, a special theoretical construct of m-theory (the offspring of string theory), to create the bubble the ship would surf down.

If the 11th dimension could be shrunk behind the ship it would create a bubble of dark energy, the same dark energy that is causing the universe to speed up as time goes on. Expanding the 11th dimension in front of the ship would eventually cause it to decrease, although two separate steps are required.

Exactly how the 11th dimension would be expanded and shrunk is still unknown.

"These calculations are based on some arbitrary advance in technology or some alien technology that would let us manipulate the extra dimension," said Cleaver.

What the scientists were able to estimate was the amount of energy necessary, if the technology was available, to change these dimensions: about 10^45 joules.

"That's about the amount of energy you'd get if you converted the entire mass of Jupiter into pure energy via E = mc^2," said Cleaver, an energy far beyond anything humanity can currently envision creating.

While the challenges to creating a warp drive are quite formidable, the concept is intriguing, says Tufts University theoretical physicist Lawrence Ford.

"If there are extra dimensions and we could manipulate them, that would open up all sorts of exciting possibilities," said Ford.

"I don't see this leading immediately to a warp drive, but I could see it leading to other interesting possibilities in basic scientific research," said Ford.

Cleaver agrees that the creation of a real warp drive is still far away.

"Warp drive isn't doable now, and probably won't be for the next several millenia," said Cleaver.

In a few hours, we'll be treated to a once in a lifetime transit of Venus passing in front of the sun.

Because Venus and the earth don't orbit the sun on the exact same plane--Venus' orbit is tipped 3.4 degrees relative to ours--most of the time it's too high or too low...It only lines up in all 3 dimensions and traverses across the sun four times during an unusual 243 year cycle, with the transits coming in pairs separated by alternating periods of 121.5 and 105.5 years.

In the United States, the transit will begin at roughly 6:04 Eastern, 5:04 Central, 4:05 Mountain, and 3:06 Pacific Time. Over the course of several hours, Venus will appear as a small dot moving slowly against backdrop of the sun.

The next few transits will be in December 2117, December 2125, June 2247 and June 2255.

It should look something like this:

http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/7...8058257713.jpg

Click here around 5pm, to see an auto-updated image of the transit:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

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SONOFA!

How the VLT works....

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From ESOcast, explore the state-of-the-art technology behind the Very Large telescope, which has provided astronomers with an unequalled view of the Universe. To obtain the sharpest images of the sky, the VLT has to cope with two major effects that distort the images of celestial objects. The first one is mirror deformations due to their large sizes. This problem is corrected using a computer-controlled support system — active optics — that ensures that the mirrors keep their desired shapes under all circumstances. The second effect is produced by Earth's atmosphere, which makes stars appear blurry, even with the largest telescopes. Adaptive optics is a real-time correction of the distortions produced by the atmosphere using computer-controlled mirrors that deform hundreds of times per second to counteract the atmospheric effects.

As one demonstration of its power the VLT's sensitive infrared cameras, helped by adaptive optics, have been able to peer through the massive dust clouds that block our view to Milky Way's core. The images, taken over many years, have allowed astronomers to actually watch stars orbiting around the monstrous black hole that lies in the center of our galaxy. It was even possible to detect energetic flares from gas clouds falling into the black hole.

Male humans do this to each other too. It's called prison rape

The Pains of Science...

The Decelerating Doctor

After World War II, the US Air Force needed to know if pilots could eject from supersonic jets without facing certain death because of the shock of rapidly decelerating from the speed of sound to a near standstill. The transition exposed pilots to forces of over 40 or 50 Gs. (One G equals the force of gravity at the surface of the earth; 40 Gs is like a 7000-pound elephant falling on top of you.) Many doctors believed that 18 Gs was the most a human body could endure, but no one knew for sure. Flight surgeon John Paul Stapp volunteered to serve as the guinea pig in a series of physically brutal experiments to find out.

At Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Stapp designed a rocket-powered sled that blasted down a 3500-foot track at speeds up to 750 mph before slamming into a pool of water that brought it to an abrupt halt. It went from 750 mph to zero in one second. Strong restraints made sure that the passenger didn’t continue their forward trajectory, though the restraints didn’t always work. One test dummy came free of the harness and was catapulted 700 feet through the air.

For his inaugural rocket sled ride, in 1947, Stapp went at a gentle 90 mph. The next day he advanced to 200 mph. And subsequently he kept signing up for more rides, upping his speed, probing the limits of human endurance. Over a period of seven years he rode the sled twenty-nine times.

Each time he rode the sled, the force of the deceleration hammered his body. He repeatedly endured blackouts, concussions, splitting headaches, cracked ribs, dislocated shoulders, and broken bones. One time, in a show of bravado, he set a broken wrist himself as he waited for medics to arrive. The greatest danger was to his eyes. Rapid deceleration causes the blood to pool with great force in the eyes, bursting capillaries and potentially tearing retinas. Even more disturbingly, when a human body comes to a stop that abruptly, there’s a real possibility the eyeballs will simply keep going — popping out of the skull and flying onwards.

http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/2...rocketsled.jpg
An early version of the rocket sled

On Stapp’s final ride on 10 December 1954, this almost happened. Nine rockets propelled him to 632 mph, faster than a .45 calibre bullet. He outran a jet flying overhead. And when the sled hit the water, Stapp experienced a record-breaking 46.2 Gs of force.

Stapp survived, but he later wrote of the experience, “It felt as though my eyes were being pulled out of my head… I lifted my eyelids with my fingers, but I couldn’t see a thing.” He feared he’d permanently lost his vision, but thankfully his eyesight gradually returned over the next few days. However, on account of that final ride, he suffered vision problems for the rest of his life.

The Sensitive Testes

In 1933, either Herbert Woollard or Edward Carmichael had weights stacked on his testicles for the sake of science. It’s not possible to say exactly which one of these London-based doctors bore the unusual burden, because while both participated in the experiment, only one of them lay on a table and suffered the scrotal compression. The other one did the stacking. They never revealed who served in which capacity — nor how they chose who was to be the unlucky one.

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Herbert Henry Woollard (left) and E.A. Carmichael

Their motive for this self-experiment was to better understand referred pain — the mysterious phenomenon in which injury to an internal organ causes pain to be felt elsewhere in the body. For instance, a heart attack may cause the sensation of pain in the arm. The two doctors noted that, of all the internal organs, the testicles were the most “accessible to investigation” and therefore seemed ideal for a study of referred pain.

During the experiment, the subject lay spread-eagled on a table, exposing his genitals. His colleague stooped over him and gripped the other man’s scrotal sac, drawing it forward and gently cradling it in his hand. He then rested a scale pan on a single testis, and carefully piled weights onto the pan, recording the reaction of the subject with each increase of weight.

http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/5...testicular.jpg
One of Woollard and Carmichael's charts of testicular pain

Their results, which appeared in the journal Brain, were rather spare on colorful details. They described the agony of the victim only in dry, clinical details. For instance, they reported that 300 grams of weight produced slight discomfort in the right groin, while 650 grams caused severe pain on the right side of the body. However, they did confirm that injury to the testicles does cause pain to be referred throughout the body. For instance, as the weight on the testicle increased to over two pounds, the subject reported pain “of a sickening character” not only in his groin but also spreading across his back.

Woollard and Carmichael conducted a number of variations of the experiment, in which they numbed nerves leading to the testes in order to determine how this would alter the sensation. This produced the interesting finding that, even though they eventually numbed what they believed to be every nerve leading to the testes, they couldn’t entirely abolish the pain of compression. The testes are highly sensitive organs!

Their results remain the definitive word on this subject since no other scientists have ever repeated the experiment.

More: http://www.neatorama.com/2012/06/05/...eriments-ever/

If chiefsplanet wanted to add some good to the world, we could repeat the Woollard/Carmichael experiments and add new data to their fascinating realm of research.

Did you know that you can tell the temperature by counting the chirps of a cricket? It's true! Here's the formula:

To convert cricket chirps to degrees Fahrenheit, count number of chirps in 14 seconds then add 40 to get temperature.

Example: 30 chirps + 40 = 70° F

To convert cricket chirps to degrees Celsius, count number of chirps in 25 seconds, divide by 3, then add 4 to get temperature.

Example: 48 chirps /(divided by) 3 + 4 = 20° C

http://www.almanac.com/cricket-chirp...re-thermometer

Alzheimer's vaccine trial a success

6 June

A study led by Karolinska Institutet reports for the first time the positive effects of an active vaccine against Alzheimer's disease. The new vaccine, CAD106, can prove a breakthrough in the search for a cure for this seriously debilitating dementia disease. The study is published in the distinguished scientific journal Lancet Neurology.

Alzheimer's disease is a complex neurological dementia disease that is the cause of much human suffering and a great cost to society. According to the World Health Organisation, dementia is the fastest growing global health epidemic of our age. The prevailing hypothesis about its cause involves APP (amyloid precursor protein), a protein that resides in the outer membrane of nerve cells and that, instead of being broken down, form a harmful substance called beta-amyloid, which accumulates as plaques and kills brain cells.

There is currently no cure for Alzheimer's disease, and the medicines in use can only mitigate the symptoms. In the hunt for a cure, scientists are following several avenues of attack, of which vaccination is currently the most popular. The first human vaccination study, which was done almost a decade ago, revealed too many adverse reactions and was discontinued. The vaccine used in that study activated certain white blood cells (T cells), which started to attack the body's own brain tissue.

The new treatment, which is presented in Lancet Neurology, involves active immunisation, using a type of vaccine designed to trigger the body's immune defence against beta-amyloid. In this second clinical trial on humans, the vaccine was modified to affect only the harmful beta-amyloid. The researchers found that 80 per cent of the patients involved in the trials developed their own protective antibodies against beta-amyloid without suffering any side-effects over the three years of the study. The researchers believe that this suggests that the CAD106 vaccine is a tolerable treatment for patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's. Larger trials must now be conducted to confirm the CAD106 vaccine's efficacy.

The study was carried out by Professor Bengt Winblad at Karolinska Institutet's Alzheimer's Disease Research Centre in Huddinge and leading neurologists in the Swedish Brain Power network: consultant Niels Andreasen from Karolinska University Hospital, Huddinge; Professor Lennart Minthon from the MAS University Hospital, Malmö; and Professor Kaj Blennow from the Sahlgrenska Academy, Gothenburg. The study was financed by Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis.

Moth Blocks Bat Attack by Jamming Sonar


Navy engineers aren’t the only ones who can jam sonar. Scientists have discovered a species of tiger moth that thwarts hungry bats by emitting extra-loud clicks to block the bats’ ability to echolocate.

Researchers have long known that some species of moths send out clicks in response to bat sonar, but until now, no one has been able to prove that the clicks actually interfere with echolocation. “The idea of a jamming mechanism has been thrown around for 50 years, but nobody has really put a moth and a bat together in a flight room to see what happens,” said ecology graduate student Aaron Corcoran of Wake Forest University, co-author of the study published Thursday in Science.

Corcoran and his colleagues pitted a particularly noisy species of tiger moth, the Bertholdia trigona, against big brown bats trained to hunt in a flight room. As long as the moths were able to click, the bats couldn’t catch them, even though the moths were tethered on a string.

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But when the scientists pierced a small hole in the moths’ sound-producing structures, called tymbals, the silenced moths quickly became lunch.

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“It’s the first good, solid case of this going on,” said insect behavior expert James Fullard of the University of Toronto at Mississauga, who was not involved in the study. “For this bat and this moth, it looks pretty convincing that jamming is what’s going on.”


Not all clicking moths can jam sonar, Fullard said, and that’s part of what makes this discovery so exciting. Previous research revealed that two other varieties of tiger moth make clicks that are too quiet to interfere with bat echolocation. Instead, he said, these moths likely use the clicks as a warning: Because most moths that click back at bats are poisonous, scientists think the noise may communicate, “Don’t eat me, I taste bad.”

But B. trigona isn’t poisonous, and the Wake Forest researchers experimented with young bats that had no prior exposure to clicking moths, so they hadn’t already learned to equate clicking with a bad taste. Nor did it seem like the bats were just startled by the clicking moths. Even after multiple attempts on multiple nights, the bats still couldn’t catch the intact B. trigona.

“Mammals habituate to startle rather quickly,” Corcoran said. “We went through seven days of trials, but the bats never habituated. They were put off by the clicks right away and throughout the whole experiment.”

The researchers haven’t yet proven how the moth’s sonar-jamming mechanism works, but they have two leading hypotheses: The moth’s clicks may act as false echoes, essentially making the bat “see” double, or they may interrupt the bat’s own echoes, making its prey appear closer than it is.

Unlike other moths, B. trigona appears to be particularly suited for jamming sonar because it can make up to 4,500 clicks per second. Near-constant noise is important because it prevents a bat from hearing the echoes of its own sonar clicks.

“If the timing is just right, if a click arrives in the two millisecond window shortly before the arrival of a real echo, it’s going to throw off the ranging software of the bat,” said echolocation expert Bill Conner, who led the project. “That’s why this animal, we think, evolved sounds that cover all of acoustic time. If you listen to the recordings, the moths produce clicks all of the time, and that greatly increases the probability that some clicks will fall into that precise time window.”

The group first spotted the noisy B. trigona in a cloud forest in Ecuador, but they were particularly excited to discover the moth as far north as Arizona. To search for evidence of sonar jamming outside the lab, the researchers have now set up a field station in the Chiricahua National Monument of southeast Arizona, where 18 species of bats interact with more than 30 kinds of tiger moths, including B. trigona.

“There will always be some researchers who will say, ‘Well you’ve proven that you can jam sonar in the laboratory, but does it really happen in the field?’” Conner said. “That’s the reason for the follow-up.”

Good week... wife just filed for a new provisional patent on a new type of medical device. Could revolutionize spine procedures and have non-medical implications as well. I'm proud!

:clap:


Imagination and discovery.

THAT IS AMERICA.

A black physicist arguing for more funding from a black president?

This is why we're a great nation. Nationality, ethnicity, race, none of these matter.

Results.

Accomplishment.

These matter.

This is our heart, our soul, our purpose.

Exploration is what we are...

Glad this was posted. Just set a reminder on my calendar!

Scientist creates lifelike cells out of metal

Researcher says he has created living cells made of metal instead of carbon — and they may be evolving.


Scientists trying to create artificial life generally work under the assumption that life must be carbon-based, but what if a living thing could be made from another element?

One British researcher may have proven that theory, potentially rewriting the book of life. Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow has created lifelike cells from metal — a feat few believed feasible. The discovery opens the door to the possibility that there may be life forms in the universe not based on carbon, reports New Scientist.

Even more remarkable, Cronin has hinted that the metal-based cells may be replicating themselves and evolving.

"I am 100 percent positive that we can get evolution to work outside organic biology," he said.

The high-functioning "cells" that Cronin has built are constructed from large polyoxometalates derived from a range of metal atoms, like tungsten. He gets them to assemble in bubbly spheres by mixing them in a specialized saline solution, and calls the resultant cell-like structures "inorganic chemical cells," or iCHELLs.

The metallic bubbles are certainly cell-like, but are they actually alive? Cronin has made a compelling case for the comparison by constructing the iCHELLS with a number of features that make them function much as real cells do. For instance, by modifying the outer oxide structure of the bubbles so that they are porous, he has essentially built iCHELLs with membranes capable of selectively allowing chemicals in and out according to size, much as what happens with the walls of real cells.

Cronin's team has also created bubbles inside of bubbles, which opens the door to the possibility of developing specialized "organelles." Even more compelling, some of the iCHELLs are being equipped with the ability to photosynthesize. The process is still rudimentary, but by linking some oxide molecules to light sensitive dyes, the team has constructed a membrane that splits water into hydrogen ions, electrons and oxygen when illuminated — which is how photosynthesis begins in real cells.

Of course, the most compelling lifelike quality of the iCHELLs so far is their ability to evolve. Although they aren't equipped with anything remotely resembling DNA, and therefore can't replicate themselves in the same way that real cells do, Cronin has nevertheless managed to create some polyoxometalates that can use each other as templates to self-replicate. Furthermore, he is currently embarked on a seven-month experiment to see if iCHELLs placed in different environments will evolve.

The early results have been encouraging. "I think we have just shown the first droplets that can evolve," Cronin hinted.

Though the idea of a strange new metal-based form of life rapidly evolving in a lab somewhere on Earth may sound ominous, the finding could forever change how life is defined. It also greatly improves the odds of life existing elsewhere in the universe, since life forms could potentially be built from any number of different elements.

The possibilities are exciting to imagine, even if Cronin's iCHELLs eventually fall short of full-blown living cells. His research may have already blown the door off previous paradigms about the conditions necessary for life to form.

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/resear...s-out-of-metal

I swear, Rausch, sometimes I think we were separated at birth.

I don't know how many times I've read one of your posts and realized that if I had gotten to the thread first the post would have had my name on it.

Good luck getting through airport security, Mr. Tungsten!

It has begun...
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gj5P-HuC4I...ator_robot.jpg[

I thought this was neat. MacFarlane is trying to bring back Cosmos. This little interview explains why. Interesting take from the Family Guy brain...

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Seth MacFarlane is creating a folllow-up to Carl Sagan's seminal TV show Cosmos.

Here, he talks to Forbes about why the world really, really needs science.

It's all in the name of science... I swear...

http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/927...ww71r18cni.jpg

Interesting article on potential commercial space vehicles...

http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/08/us/spa...html?hpt=hp_c2

How pigeons get to be superstitious

B.F. Skinner is a psychologist best known for the Skinner Box, a kind of sensory-deprivation device which limits the creature inside it to only one form of stimulus at a time. Using one such box, he discovered 'superstition' in pigeons.

One of the troubles with scientific experiments is that researchers need to keep all factors controlled. To keep all the pesky extra factors out of circulation, B.F. Skinner decided to literally shut them out. How? By putting the subject in a box. The Skinner Box took the subject out of a chaotic situation and put it in a blank box. The psychologist could then impose a single condition on the subject, like always giving a pigeon food if it pecks a button. Will it peck again? Only scrutiny will tell. Riveting stuff like that.

In one particular case, Skinner decided to go random on his hungry pigeons. He dropped food into the box at completely random times, independent of any behavior on the part of the pigeons. But the behavior of the pigeons, he found, didn't stay random. After a few drops of the food, the pigeons began exhibiting certain consistent behavior. One circled counter-clockwise, another spun around in circles; seventy-five percent of them exhibited some kind of odd behavior.

Skinner concluded that the pigeons had come to display 'superstitious behavior'. It was like the superstition of gamblers who believe they have a lucky hat. If the gambler wears the hat, they can't lose. If the pigeons circle the cage counter-clockwise, they will bring on food pellets.

This might be an over-statement. The gambler has the capacity to understand rationally that a green hat won't bring good cards. The pigeons, on the other hand, have tiny little pea brains. The only creature who could understand that the food drops were random was the psychologist himself. Misunderstanding the situation is not the same as superstition. The experiment does, however, show that pigeons have a compulsion to search for pattern in events around them, the same way we do.

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I love the part in the video, where he talks about gambling, and how it relates to operant conditioning. Gambling and lottery tickets and such are a hilarious example of the operant conditioning affecting humans.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/ar...on-starts.html

Arthritis breakthrough 'could stop crippling condition before it starts'

First study to prove gut flora plays a role in rheumatoid arthritis

By Claire Bates

PUBLISHED: 03:27 EST, 13 June 2012 | UPDATED: 05:49 EST, 13 June 2012

Comments (8)
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A breakthrough in our understanding of how rheumatoid arthritis develops could help scientists spot those at risk and even stop the condition before it starts.

Researchers have found that billions of bugs in our guts play a role in regulating the immune system.

The team from the Mayo Clinic in the U.S said that larger-than-normal populations of specific gut bacteria may trigger the development of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.

More after the jump.

Just forwarded the link to the mrs and one of the women at Arthritis Community Services,thanks.

Wow. That's really good news.

I find it really interesting that the more we finally learn about the human body, the more obvious it becomes that bacteria play a huge role in our health and livelihood. Which goes against 100s of years of medical experience. It used to be "Ewww. Kill all bacteria and germs!". Now it's more like "Wait, look at what those bacteria are actually doing! WTF? Maybe those little bugs aren't all bad after all"

No problem.

I am always looking out for this type of stuff. Took my wife to a Functional medical team last year and one of the first things they put on was a probiotic among a few other natural things no drugs.

And sticking with the bacteria theme.. here's one for the ladies....


Bacteria Are Fighting a Giant, Mysterious War in Your Vagina Right Now

No matter how many abstinence pledges you've signed or purity balls you've attended, your vagina anything but pure, according to new research by, uh, vaginologists. In fact, your between-the-legs chute is the perfect hot, wet environment for an ongoing "dynamic battle" between various microorganisms. And scientists are discovering that they more they learn about the miraculous constant bacterial armageddon occurring inside the human vagina, the more baffled they are by it. Women!

LiveScience reports that researchers have discovered that not only does the "bacterial fingerprint" (or, if you want to be gross about it, "micro pussy menagerie") of the human vagina vary from woman to woman, it varies from day to day, from life stage to life stage, and it can change based on who you're ****ing, your menstrual cycle, or because your vagina just feels like being difficult. Bacterial profiles of women's vaginas even varies between women of different races; black women tend to host a different, more diverse set of bacteria than white women. In the words of researchers at the University of Maryland, "We know that different women have different kinds of vaginal microbiota, and now we know that over time the dynamics of the change that we observed vary."

Scientists also found that the dynamism of the vagina exists without as much outside interference as, say, your skin, or even your stomach. Your vagina is sort of a perfect machine in a constant state of flux and chaos, like Jupiter's Great Read Spot or the lyrics to an early Fiona Apple song. You're a bitch, you're a lover, you're a child, you're a mother... in your vagina. But the takeaway from this research isn't just "whoa, vaginas are weird, like dark squishy tomatoes that live inside your pelvis" (even though the average vagina has the same pH as a tomato); rather, this research shines light on the fact that sudden changes in the type of bacteria living in your vagina aren't necessarily a sign of an imbalance that needs to be corrected. In fact, dramatic changes to the vagina's bacterial profile is natural, normal, and healthy. But mysterious. Always mysterious.

The human body is gross and amazing, depending on how much you think about it and how high you are.

BONUS: How to Make Your Vagina Taste Awesome

A fish with a transparent head... Awesome and weird...

The big green orbs are the actual eyes.

http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/6...ntheadbarr.jpg

http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/3...nthead2210.jpg

Transparent-Headed Fish
Photograph courtesy Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

February 23, 2009--With a head like a fighter-plane cockpit, a Pacific barreleye fish shows off its highly sensitive, barrel-like eyes--topped by green, orblike lenses--in a picture released today but taken in 2004.

The fish, discovered alive in the deep water off California's central coast by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), is the first specimen of its kind to be found with its soft transparent dome intact.

The 6-inch (15-centimeter) barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) had been known since 1939--but only from mangled specimens dragged to the surface by nets.

So black men had it right this entire time?

http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/5...9e8369ac1o.jpg

The Tarantula is a sprawling star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy. Of course, "small" is a matter of perspective; the LMC is still tens of thousands of light years across and has several billion stars in it. From its distance of 180,000 light years, the LMC appears as a smudge in the sky to the unaided eyes of southern observers.

[...]

The Tarantula Nebula is a forbidding object. It’s well over 600 light years across, has millions of times the Sun’s mass worth of gas jammed into it, and is forming stars so furiously that astronomers think it may actually be creating a globular cluster, a spherical ball of hundreds of thousands of stars. You may have heard of the Orion Nebula, one of the largest and brightest of all nebulae in the Milky Way. Well, the Tarantula is thousands of times more luminous; if it were as far away as the Orion Nebula, the Tarantula would be bright enough to cast shadows on the ground!

Click here for an amazing superhuge version of the pic: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/i...g/eso1033a.jpg

You can get lost for quite a while looking at that gigantic image... just looking at how little blackness you can see in between the stars is amazing to me. So many little dots, it's unfathomable.

Pizza science....

http://img814.imageshack.us/img814/7...1634585560.jpg

technically, that's pizza math.

Wanna have a nerdgasm?

If you have an HDMI output on your pc, connect it to a large TV.

Boner.

Some would argue that math is a science....

from a certain perspective, it fits some of the criteria needed to fit as a 'science.' from my perspective, though, it doesn't come close enough.

This things been jetting through space for 34 years & is just now at the edge of our solar system, the universe is big. Man.

http://space.brevardtimes.com/2012/0...ar-system.html

Your brain makes its own pot.... also, there's now a potential vaccine for cocaine addiction, which tricks the brain into counteracting the affect of coke so that it has no effect.

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Have scientists found the Higgs Boson?

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/An...inent_999.html

And to add to the mind-bogglingness; they're traveling at approximately 100 miles every 5 SECONDS.

I thought this was cool: A working model steam engine made of glass.


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I've heard for years that Higgs Boson is the "God Particle" and that it would be a major breakthrough. I understand that the Standard Model predicts it, as it predicted other particles before they were discovered.

But I've never heard anyone speculate on the practical applications that might come from this discovery. If we find it tomorrow, are we that much closer to a warp drive, or anti-gravity, or more efficient energy? What could we do with that knowledge?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake. Even if it just provides more evidence that the Standard Model is correct, I'm all for it. I've just never heard anyone discuss possible practical applications of the discovery of the Higgs Boson.

The bolded part is the only application we'd see for a long time as a result. It wouldn't really provide us with anything in the short term. It would provide a great deal of validation though, and would change the way physics is taught and understood.

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Google Scientists recently... wait.... what? Google Scientists? Google is employing scientists now?

Anyway, Google Scientists recently created a "brain", an AI system that is capable of "learning". What's the first thing the AI taught itself? Finding cat pics online. Yup....

Google Brain Teaches Itself to Recognize — What Else? — Cats
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own. Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats.

The neural network taught itself to recognize cats, which, John Markoff of The New York Times reports, is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh. The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the Internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items.

The research is representative of a new generation of computer science that is exploiting the falling cost of computing and the availability of huge clusters of computers in giant data centers. It is leading to significant advances in areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation.

Google scientists said that the research project had now moved out of the Google X laboratory and was being pursued in the division that houses the company’s search business and related services. Potential applications include improvements to image search, speech recognition and machine language translation.

.

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So, I think this is kinda scary and thought I'd share in this thread rather than starting a new one.

A family member of mine is a high ranking official at the Ames research facility in northern California. He has always shared facinating things with me when I ask direct questions. I was out there last month I asked him at dinner if he thinks there is anything to this whole mayan calendar thing and if I should expect to prepare for anything out of the ordinary.

This is a full eye contact guy that is a total straight shooter. If I ask, he ALWAYS answers without beating around the bush.

This time was different.

He immediately looked down, wouldn't look at me at all and said "you know, Paul...I really don't know"

I'm going back out there in a few days and am contemplating asking again, thinking maybe it was due to the public setting that he didn't want to talk openly about it...but he got "shook" when I asked him.

Do you guys think it would be rude to ask again?

I have very little worry about any Mayan prophecies. The Mayans were incredibly advanced in some ways. But they were not prophets or experts in future events. The amazing part about the Mayan calendar was its chronological accuracy, not its ability to predict future events. It was simply math, not prediction of any sort. The were masters of astronomy, and the cyclical patterns of the heavens. Which allowed them to project their calendars into the future thousands of years with astonishing accuracy. But that's very different than predicting any actual events that would/could occur at those future times other than astronomical stuff. Predicting the position or phase of the moon has nothing to do with the world ending by fire and brimstone and raining frogs and rivers of blood.

Also remember that there are many different Mayan calendars. And most of them have already cycled past the supposed end of the world date, due to the invention of leap years in the Gregorian calendar. Some of them won't cycle for many many years after Dec. 2012.

This. And even if the world ends, WTF are you going to do about it other than make peace with God?

Futile worrying if you ask me.

I think it would be a waste of time but not rude. The Mayans didn't "know" anything or even predict the end of the world. Just the end of an age. I'd be more scared of a rabbits foot.




It might have fleas.

I guess I've been thinking of it a lot because I think if there was nothing to it, he would have made a joke or answered quickly.

Him saying he didn't know was one thing out of the ordinary...looking away was totally not like him.

He probably had lots ofother stuff on his mind and I'm overthinking things...

You're probably right. The thing is, everything we know about the Mayans has come from scientists/historians with no agenda for hiding information. Quite the opposite, everything they learned is pretty much readily available to anyone who wants to learn. It's essentially out of the US government, or any other organization's control as far as hiding any information about it. And everything that is known indicates that the Mayans had no intentions of predicting the end of time/civilization/etc. Or predicting anything for that matter, other than where the moon or Venus might be positioned exactly 6 months from now.

Some of the most knowledgeable people in the world regarding Mayan culture and history have said the entire Mayan end of world idea is totally bunk and completely a product of misinformation and overactive imagination. That's good enough for me..

I skipped to the middle of that movie.

I laughed out loud at 13:49 in that movie. hilarious.

LMAO.... you would....

Science's Long—and Successful—Search for Where Memory Lives

After more than a century of searching, an answer was recently found, strangely enough, just eight miles from Grauman’s. Although not located on any tourist map, the scene of the discovery can be reached easily from Hollywood Boulevard by heading west on Sunset to the campus of UCLA. There, amid one of the densest clusters of neuroscience research facilities in the world, stands the Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center. And sitting at a table in the building’s first-floor restaurant, the Café Synapse, is the neuroscientist who has come closer than anyone ever thought possible to finding the place where memories are written in the brain.

That spot, the physical substrate of a particular memory, has long been known in brain research as an engram. Decades of scientific dogma asserted that engrams exist only in vast webs of connections, not in a particular place but in distributed neural networks running widely through the brain. Yet a series of pioneering studies have demonstrated that it is possible to lure specific memories into particular neurons, at least in mice. If those neurons are killed or temporarily inactivated, the memories vanish. If the neurons are reactivated, the memories return. These same studies have also begun to explain how and why the brain allocates each memory to a particular group of cells and how it links them together and organizes them—the physical means by which the scent of a madeleine, the legendary confection that sparked Marcel Proust’s memory stream, leads to remembrance of things past.

“It’s amazing,” says neurobiologist Alcino Silva, codirector of the UCLA Integrative Center for Learning and Memory. “For the last hundred years, scientists have been looking for the engram in the brain. We have now gotten to the point that we know enough about memory and how memories are formed that we can actually find the engram, and by finding it, we can manipulate it.”

The implications of that finding hold promise for the treatment of human memory disorders. On the one hand, it points the way toward the selective targeting of neurons that hold memories of events so traumatic that people are disabled by them. That violent attack that you cannot get over? Deactivate those neurons in the amygdala that are linked to it, and you might still remember the attack but be freed from the unbearable pall of fear. With 3.5 percent of U.S. adults estimated to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over the course of a given year, an effective new treatment would mark a mental-health milestone.

While PTSD sufferers remember too well, those with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia suffer the opposite problem. And just as Silva and others studying engrams have demonstrated the ability to delete memories, they have also shown they can strengthen them. This past July Silva’s colleague Sheena Josselyn, a neurobiologist at the University of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, reported that her lab improved memory in mice bred to have the equivalent of Alzheimer’s. Using the same tools effective in creating and then purging fear, she boosted an entire brain region, the hippocampus, known to be critical for forming long-term memories.

Offering up what he concedes is a “science fiction kind of idea,” Silva wonders if physicians treating patients with Alzheimer’s “could direct memories to those regions of the brain that remain strong. Especially in neurodegenerative disorders, you have parts of the brain that are healthy and others that are not. If we find strategies to funnel memories to those parts that are still intact, we may be able to extend function longer.”

More in the link....

He was probably looking down so you couldn't see his eyes rolling as he was thinking "Jesus, not this crap again."

http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/Pres...er-ice-hot.asp

Attention CP expert physicists: if you can explain why warm water freezes faster than cool water you can win £1000. Pretty cool stuff.

:spock:

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The Mayan doomsday prophecy was just a government-concocted plan to hide the massacre they're engineering for us on December 21st, 2012. Just like the 9/11 disaster and the JFK assassination, it's all smoke and mirrors, bro. They're worried about the growing population problem and maintaining control so they're gonna exterminate us. The worst part about it is, with all this Mayan prophecy bs, no one will even suspect it was our own government that set the plan in motion to kill us all..

STOCK UP ON WEED NOW, BRO! /Bump

Very possible if the person we are talking about was anyone else.

He would have loved to get a good laugh at it if it was funny or wacky...especially coming from me.

You would have to know him to know what I'm taking about, I guess.

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Give me a shot, I'd like to go deep sea diving and don't want to be bothered with any scuba gear...

Scientists Invent Particles That Will Let You Live Without Breathing
Jesus Diaz

This may seem like something out of a science fiction movie: researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you can't breathe anymore. It's one of the best medical breakthroughs in recent years, and one that could save millions of lives every year.

The invention, developed by a team at Boston Children's Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minutes despite major respiratory failure. This is enough time for doctors and emergency personnel to act without risking a heart attack or permanent brain injuries in the patient.

The solution has already been successfully tested on animals under critical lung failure. When the doctors injected this liquid into the patient's veins, it restored oxygen in their blood to near-normal levels, granting them those precious additional minutes of life.

Particles of fat and oxygen

The particles are composed of oxygen gas pocketed in a layer of lipids, a natural molecule that usually stores energy or serves as a component to cell membranes. Lipids can be waxes, some vitamins, monoglycerides, diglycerides, triglycerides, phospholipids, or—as in this case—fats.

These fatty oxygen particles are about two to four micrometers in size. They are suspended in a liquid solution that can be easily carried and used by paramedics, emergency crews and intensive care personnel. This seemingly magic elixir carries "three to four times the oxygen content of our own red blood cells."

Similar solutions have failed in the past because they caused gas embolism, rather than oxygenating the cells. According to John Kheir, MD at the Department of Cardiology at Boston Children's Hospital, they solved the problem by using deformable particles, rather than bubbles:

We have engineered around this problem by packaging the gas into small, deformable particles. They dramatically increase the surface area for gas exchange and are able to squeeze through capillaries where free gas would get stuck.

Kheir had the idea of an injected oxygen solution started after he had to treat a little girl in 2006. Because of a lung hemorrhage caused by pneumonia, the girl sustained severe brain injuries which, ultimately, lead to her death before the medical team could place her in a heart-lung machine.

Soon after, Kheir assembled a team of chemical engineers, particle scientists, and medical doctors to work on this idea, which had promising results from the very beginning:

Some of the most convincing experiments were the early ones. We drew each other's blood, mixed it in a test tube with the microparticles, and watched blue blood turn immediately red, right before our eyes.

It sounds like magic, but it was just the start of what, after years of investigation, became this real life-giving liquid in a bottle.

This is what the future is about. And it's a beautiful one indeed, one that is arriving earlier than we ever could have expected. I wonder if this would find its way to other uses. I can see it as an emergency injection in a spaceship, for example. But what about getting a shot for diving?

I love how the speed is measured in terms of pirating Blu-ray downloads...

Scientists Create Wi-Fi That Can Transmit Seven Blu-ray Movies Per Second


If you think your home Wi-Fi connection is fast, think again. Scientists have been working on a new way to transmit data wirelessly, and they can now transfer a scorching 2.5 terabits of information per second.

Let us put that another way: that's over 8,000 times faster than Verizon's fastest wired home internet connection, FiOS, that only manages a paltry 300Mbps. Or, to put it in real terms, it's the same as transmitting seven full Blu-ray movies per second. Basically, this shit is crazy fast.
But how the hello do they do it? Well, the team of American and Israeli researchers have used a neat new concept, where the electromagnetic waves that usually carry data are twisted into vortex beams. ExtremeTech describes the concept well:

These twisted signals use orbital angular momentum (OAM) to cram much more data into a single stream. In current state-of-the-art transmission protocols (WiFi, LTE, COFDM), we only modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) of radio waves, not the OAM. If you picture the Earth, SAM is our planet spinning on its axis, while OAM is our movement around the Sun. Basically, the breakthrough here is that researchers have created a wireless network protocol that uses both OAM and SAM.

The combination of the two provides some amazing possibilities. So far, the researchers, from University of Southern California, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Tel Aviv University, have twisted together eight data streams, each operating at 300 Gbps, to achieve the new record of 2.5 terabits per second. At the moment, they've only transmitted signals as far as 1 meter. That should be scaled up before long—though the researchers admit 1 kilometer is probably an upper limit.

What's perhaps most interesting is that the technique can be used to twist together an awful lot of slower data connections. The researchers, who have published their findings in Nature, explain that in theory it should be possible to twist together hundreds or even thousands of conventional LTE signals into a single beam. That ought to help address the imprending bandwith crisis.

Of course, all that remains is for the team to develop the technology into something robust enough to use on a commercial scale—and there's no telling how long that might take.

I want that wifi!

There is no "Mayan calendar thing." It's a media invention.

They never even said the end of the world. End of an age...

The science behind the 4th of July...

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/1263/fireworks1r.jpg

HOW FIREWORKS LIGHT UP THE SKY

Here are some interesting facts about fireworks you can impress your family and friends with as you watch the show.

Fireworks manufacturing

Manufactures all have their own recipes for creating their fireworks; but the basic chemistry behind is the same for any fireworks.

Manufacturers start by combining a mixture of metals and oxidizers such as chlorates, perchlorates, or nitrates. The type of metals used influences the fireworks colours while the oxidizers provide the oxygen needed to achieve the required temperature for the reaction. Water is also added to the mixture to bind the metals and oxidizers together. This damp mixture is then cut into smaller pieces known as “stars”.

The manufacturers then fill a fireworks shell with “stars” and black powder, a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur. A time-delay fuse is also inserted into the shell which ignites the black powder and stars causing the shell to burst open.

Firework colours

There are 5 basic colours for fireworks, and each colour is produced by a different metal:

Red—strontium

Green—barium

Yellow—sodium

Blue—copper

White—aluminum, magnesium, or titanium

Dr. Paul Worsey teaches commercial pyrotechnics operations at the University of Misouri-Rolla in the United States said in an issue of JOM that the art of fireworks lies in getting the right temperature for the reaction to occur.

“Some colours are pretty easy, and those colours would be red and green,” says Worsey, “but you can tell how good a firework manufacturer is by the quality of their blues.” Blue is such a difficult colour to produce because the reaction temperature has to be perfect.

In the same issue of JOM, Phil Grucci executive VP of the New York based fireworks manufacturing company Fireworks by Grucci explained that too much or too rich of an oxidizer that’s combined with the copper causes the mixture to burn at temperatures that are too high—causing a washed out powder blue colour. But burning the mixtures at temperatures that are too low may result in an orange-red colour, rather than blue—or the mixture may even fail to ignite.

Aside from the basic fireworks colours, other colours can be made by mixing the elements that create the primary colours. For example, purple explosions are created when a copper oxidizer (used to make blue fireworks) is combined with a certain amount of strontium (used to make red fireworks). Pastel explosions can be made by adding white-light generating elements such as aluminium, magnesium or titanium to the firework’s composition.

Fireworks effects

The metal used influences not just the colour but also the look of a firework. For example,

a “salute” firework is a quick burst of light with a loud sound and contains finely ground metal powders. The fine powder explodes in a burst of light and burns out quickly. The silver colour of a “salute” is made by combining an oxidizer and aluminum powder. Titanium is also added to the firework mixture to produce a sparkling effect.

In comparison, a waterfall (or willow) firework explodes in the air and leaves a trail of colour then as it slowly falls to the ground. This type of longer lasting firework uses charcoal and flakes of metal because they burn at a slower rate.

Fireworks shapes

Some fireworks create familiar shapes like as rings, stars, and hearts as they explode. The trick behind these fireworks is the plastic mold that’s placed inside the fireworks shell. The “star” is arranged inside the shell using a plastic mold of the same shape as the fireworks explosion (e.g. ring, star, heart). When the fireworks explode, the “star” will break out of the mold and form the desired shape.

The Mayans never accounted for leap days so the calendar actually ended months ago.