Sunday, September 23, 2007

Earth 250 Million Years from Now

All the continents return to Pangea

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Hmm

Russian press is highly questionable, so I would have to see a lot more scientific papers on this. However, if its true, it would be a great thing. Sounds too good to be true, though.

Russian scientists in the Khibinsky Mountains in the Arctic Circle have made an important scientific discovery. They’ve found a new mineral which absorbs radiation.

It does not yet have an official name and is known only as number 27-4. It can absorb radioactivity from liquid nuclear waste.

“It can extract radioactive substances from any water-based solution and so has a very important practical significance,” said Yakov Pakhomovsky, the head of the Kolsky Research Institute.
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After coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe. Had this mineral been available to physicists after the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disasters, the consequences might have been very different, as both accidents resulted in contamination from radioactive water.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Imagining the 10th Dimension

This film explains all 10 dimensions of reality in a pretty succinct way. You may still have a hard time understanding it. But it does a great job of explaining the fundamentals of string theory. Which is the current, generally accepted theory of the universe. 

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Can the Future Leak into the Present?

Physics deals with some amazing stuff. Here’s the latest.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Switching Species

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) today announced the results of work on genome transplantation methods allowing them to transform one type of bacteria into another type dictated by the transplanted chromosome. The work, published online in the journal Science, by JCVI’s Carole Lartigue, Ph.D. and colleagues, outlines the methods and techniques used to change one bacterial species, Mycoplasma capricolum into another, Mycoplasma mycoides Large Colony (LC), by replacing one organism’s genome with the other one’s genome.

“The successful completion of this research is important because it is one of the key proof of principles in synthetic genomics that will allow us to realize the ultimate goal of creating a synthetic organism,” said J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., president and chairman, JCVI. “We are committed to this research as we believe that synthetic genomics holds great promise in helping to solve issues like climate change and in developing new sources of energy.”

if this is true, this could have all kinds of implications.

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Beam Me Up

Scientists have set a new record in sending information through thin air using the revolutionary technology of quantum teleportation - although Mr Spock may have to wait a little longer for a Scotty to beam him up with it.

A team of physicists has teleported data over a distance of 89 miles from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighbouring island of Tenerife, which is 10 times further than the previous attempt at teleportation through free space.

The scientists did it by exploiting the “spooky” and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement - when the state of matter rather than matter itself is sent from one place to another. Tiny packets or particles of light, photons, were used to teleport information between telescopes on the two islands. The photons did it by quantum entanglement and scientists hope it will form the basis of a way of sending encrypted data.

The teleporters used in Star Trek are said to have been based on the idea of quantum entanglement and the latest study demonstrates that elements of the phenomenon could have a practical use in the real world.

However, quantum entanglement has so far been carried out only on the simplest forms of matter and scientists believe that a fundamentally new approach will be needed if it can ever be used for teleporting people or even non-living objects.

The teleporters in Star Trek were just made up because the producers felt it would cost too much to have a shuttle craft. Maybe they’re talking about the later shows. Regardless, this is interesting news. 

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Super-Water?

US scientists have developed “super-oxidised” water which they say speeds up wound healing.

Oculus, the Californian firm which developed the water - made by filtering it through a salt membrane - says it kills viruses, bacteria and fungi.

It is also effective against MRSA and UK trials are being carried out on patients with diabetic foot ulcers, New Scientist magazine reported.

Experts said wound healing was a major problem for people with diabetes.

The key ingredient of the water, called Microcyn, are oxychlorine ions - electrically charged molecules which pierce the cell walls of free-living microbes.

BBC

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Low Gravity

Very interesting.

If it seems Canadians weigh less than their American neighbours, they do – but not for the reasons you might think. A large swath of Canada actually boasts lower gravity than its surroundings.

Researchers have puzzled for years over whether this was due to the crust there rebounding slowly after the end of the last ice age or a deeper issue involving convection in the Earth’s mantle – or some combination of the two.

Now, ultra-precise measurements taken over four years by a pair of satellites known as GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) reveal that each effect is equally responsible for Canada’s low gravity. The work could shed light on how continents form and evolve over time.

I’ll refrain from making jokes about Canadians being lightweights.

Friday, May 04, 2007

Psuedo-science vs Real Science

This article does a great job breaking down what the signs of junk science are. And what do you know, many of them apply to the man-made global warming theory. Those who question or insult the skeptics are not being very skeptical themselves. Junk science preys on the human desire to believe in something. So it often tells people what they want to hear. After the environmentalist movement started this drumbeat of “humans are killing the planet”, it was easy to convince a lot of people to believe in man made global warming, even though the science really shows the earth is going through natural climate change brought on my a solar cycle.

But there’s no money in something being natural. If you guilt people, you can separate them from their wallets. That’s what junk science often attempts to do. Sell people some bogus invention. And this is why we need to look at the whole global warming thing with skepticism. 

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Real Progress Doesn’t Come from “Progressives”

I was a young teen with the first Earth Day happened in 1971. I remember it well. Who can argue with the idea that we need to make the earth a cleaner, greener place? Thr problem is, the environmentalist movement became hijacked by anti-capitalist, crypto-Marxists. In order to deter capitalism, you have to hurt industry, so theyve become anti-technology which actually works at cross purposes to making the world a greener place.

As John Stossel explains, the aims of Earth Day are not based in reality.

John Semmens of Arizona’s Laissez Faire Institute points out that Earth Day misses an important point. In the April issue of The Freeman magazine, Semmens says the environmental movement overlooks how hospitable the earth has become—thanks to technology. “The environmental alarmists have it backwards. If anything imperils the earth it is ignorant obstruction of science and progress. ... That technology provides the best option for serving human wants and conserving the environment should be evident in the progress made in environmental improvement in the United States. Virtually every measure shows that pollution is headed downward and that nature is making a comeback.” (Carbon dioxide excepted, if it is really a pollutant.)

Semmens describes his visit to historic Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, an area “lush with trees and greenery.” It wasn’t always that way. In 1775, the land was cleared so it could be farmed. Today, technology makes farmers so efficient that only a fraction of the land is needed to produce much more food. As a result, “Massachusetts farmland has been allowed to revert back to forest.”

Human ingenuity and technology not only raised living standards, but also restored environmental amenities. How about a day to celebrate that?

Yet, Semmens writes, the environmental movement is skeptical about technology and is attracted to three dubious principles: sustainable development, the precautionary principle, and stakeholder participation.

Earth day is being used as a tool to empower more Marxist type measures to limit and curtail technological development and capitalism. Read the article and you’ll see what those terms mean and why they are bogus.

We live at the most prosperous time in human history. And these people would try to turn back the clock to some 19th century pre-industrial world. A world that was incredibly harsh and life expectancy was much lower.

The resources of the earth, as far as we’re concerned, are far from finite at this point. More importantly, technology provides us with the means to do things cleaner and more efficiently as technology improves. We are a long way from the 1940s, 50s and 60s technology. As a computer person, I can tell you how far computers have come since the 80s. We’re making constant progress. What these people want is regression. They are not progressive at all.

We need took forward, not back. As Bjorn Lomborg once said, “We didn’t leave the stone age from lack of stones.” The real progress in society will come largely from science. And those who would stand in the way, are not real friends of the earth. As we improve our technology it will have less and less impact on nature and will do more to make the world a better place for every living thing.