Tuesday, May 13, 2008

DNA in Action

Friday, April 25, 2008

Reuben’s Tube

Mythbusters even did a spot on it

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Future of Civilization

Perhaps you’ve seen this vidcast by Michio Kaku. If not, it’s worth a look. 

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Universe in a Test Tube

Did scientists prove unifying theory and create a baby universe in a test tube? Is our universe an experiment by scientists in an uber-universe?

Sunday, December 23, 2007

The Power Of a Single Brain Cell

While there is still so much scientists don’t understand about the human brain, they are learning some fascinating things by testing a single cell.

There could be enough computing ability in just one brain cell to allow humans and animals to feel, a study suggests.

The brain has 100 billion neurons but scientists had thought they needed to join forces in larger networks to produce thoughts and sensations.

The Dutch and German study, published in Nature, found that stimulating just one rat neuron could deliver the sensation of touch.

One UK expert said this was the first time this had been measured in mammals.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Did You Know?

Did You Know: The Human Body - Watch more free videos

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Brain in a Box

These are the days of miracles and wonder.

A University of Florida scientist has grown a living “brain” that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network.

The “brain”—a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat’s brain and cultured inside a glass dish—gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene. As living computers, they may someday be used to fly small unmanned airplanes or handle tasks that are dangerous for humans, such as search-and-rescue missions or bomb damage assessments.

“We’re interested in studying how brains compute,” said Thomas DeMarse, the UF professor of biomedical engineering who designed the study. “If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were 5 years old and you can retrieve information. That’s a tremendous capacity for memory. In fact, you perform fairly simple tasks that you would think a computer would easily be able to accomplish, but in fact it can’t.”

While computers are very fast at processing some kinds of information, they can’t approach the flexibility of the human brain, DeMarse said. In particular, brains can easily make certain kinds of computations – such as recognizing an unfamiliar piece of furniture as a table or a lamp – that are very difficult to program into today’s computers.

“If we can extract the rules of how these neural networks are doing computations like pattern recognition, we can apply that to create novel computing systems,” he said.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Inner Oceans

Shades of Jules Verne. They’ve discovered an ocean of water under the earth.

Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.

The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planet’s deep mantle.

I wonder if these same seismic tests are common. If not, there could be many other such oceans in places that need water. That could be a boon to them. 

Monday, December 03, 2007

Dino-Mummy

Now this is a spectacular find.

Scientists on Monday announced the discovery of what appears to be the world’s most intact dinosaur mummy: a 67-million-year-old plant-eater that contains fossilized bones and skin tissue, and possibly muscle and organs.

Preserved by a natural fluke of time and chemistry, the four-ton mummified hadrosaur, a duck-billed herbivore common to North America, could reshape the understanding of dinosaurs and their habitat, its finders say.

“There is no doubt about it that this dinosaur is a very, very significant find,” said Tyler Lyson, a graduate student in geology at Yale University who discovered the dinosaur in North Dakota.

More here.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

The Theory of Everything, Cracked?

That is what some people are saying about the work of Garrett Lisi, 39. A surfer, no less.

The picture above is a two dimensional representation of E8, a geometric pattern that Lili claims is the shape of the universe. His theory can be read here if you understand physics. Here’s an excerpt:

All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.