Clipmarks | arifsali's Science Discovery collection

Four dimensional picture of the Universe

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 10:44:03 GMT

clipped by: pokkets

Clip Source: aether.lbl.gov

Tags: universe, dimension, time space, big bang, history, picture

India's air-powered car

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 16:41:30 GMT

clipped by: killer_bunny

Clip Source: www.engadget.com

The first commercial car to be powered by compressed air could be about to hit the production lines, as Indian automaker Tata Motors prepares to build ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre's design. We're not certain if it's the same air car that we hit just under three years ago, but if it is, it's about time! The City Cat runs on nothing but compressed air -- which can be refueled at "air stations," and overnight using a built-in compressor -- with a not too shabby top speed of 68MPH and a range of 125 miles. The Air Car designers are working on a hybrid version that can compress air while it's operating, potentially making cross-India journeys possible: Toyota Prius, eat your hybrid heart out. As EcoGeek points out, the game ain't up just yet for completely emissions free travel since the problem of the source of the electricity (usually acquired from fossil fuels) has yet to be solved. Plus, the fugly design really doesn't do it any favours: why does "green" have to mean "gah?"

Tags: car, automobile, green, india

The fish that can survive for months in a tree

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:26:25 GMT

clipped by: michellezm

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

t's one of the golden rules of the natural world – birds live in trees, fish live in water.

The trouble is, no one bothered to tell the mangrove killifish.

Scientists have discovered that it spends several months of every year out of the water and living inside trees

Hidden away inside rotten branches and trunks, the remarkable creatures temporarily alter their biological makeup so they can breathe air.

Biologists studying the killifish say they astonished it can cope for so long out of its natural habitat.

The discovery, along with its ability to breed without a mate, must make the mangrove killifish, Rivulus marmoratus Poey, one of the oddest fish known to man.

Around two inches long, they normally live in muddy pools and the flooded burrows of crabs in the mangrove swamps of Florida, Latin American and Caribbean.

The latest discovery was made by biologists wading through swamps in Belize and Florida who found hundreds of killifish hiding out of the water

Tags: fish, animals, fauna

Redheads will be extinct in 100 years say scientists

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:45:47 GMT

clipped by: michellezm

Clip Source: www.news.com.au

REDHEADS are becoming rarer and could be extinct in 100 years, according to genetic scientists.

The current National Geographic magazine reports that less than two per cent of the world's population has natural red hair, created by a mutation in northern Europe thousands of years ago.

Global intermingling, which broadens the availability of possible partners, has reduced the chances of redheads meeting and producing little redheads of their own.

It takes only one red-haired parent to produce ginger-headed babies, but two redheads obviously create a much stronger possibility.

If the gingers really want to save themselves they should move to Scotland.

An estimated 40 per cent of Scots carry the red gene and 13 per cent actually have red hair.

Some experts say that redheads could be gone as early as 2060, but others say the gene can be dormant for generations before returning.

today's carriers are more prone to skin cancer and have a higher sensitivity to heat and cold-related pain.

Tags: genetics, anthropology, current affairs

Time May Not Exist

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 03:06:12 GMT

clipped by: lifecyce1898

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

Newsflash: Time May Not Exist

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

Tags: time

Swearing at Work Good for You

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:31:50 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Perhaps not earth shattering news, but a reminder that much of our talk is not to convey information but to maintain group solidarity, identity etc. and answer our most basic psychological needs.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Swearing at work helps employees cope with stress, academics at a Norfolk university have said.

A study by Norwich's University of East Anglia (UEA) into leadership styles found the use of "taboo language" boosted team spirit.

Professor Yehuda Baruch, professor of management, warned that attempts to prevent workers from swearing could have a negative impact.

But Professor Baruch discouraged swearing in front of customers.

'Maintaining solidarity'

He said: "In most scenarios, in particular in the presence of customers or senior staff, profanity must be seriously discouraged or banned.

"However, our study suggested that, in many cases, taboo language serves the needs of people for developing and maintaining solidarity, and as a mechanism to cope with stress. Banning it could backfire.

Tags: swearing, stress

Light transmitting concrete

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:19:48 GMT

clipped by: german

Clip Source: bestpicsaround.com

Light transmitting concrete

Tags: architecture, concrete

Ants have a sense of their own mortality

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:00:25 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Ants have a sense of their own mortality

WORKER ants accurately gauge their life expectancy, regardless of their actual age, and take on riskier tasks as they feel their days ebbing away.

In social insects such as ants, bees and wasps, workers change tasks depending on their age. Older workers do the relatively risky foraging outside the nest, while younger ones engage in safer maintenance tasks within it. By extending the workers' average life span, this fine-tuning helps to maximise the fitness of the colony. However, no one knew whether the division of labour in ants was activated by age-related physiological changes or through some other mechanism.

To find out, Dawid Moron and his colleagues at Jagiellonian University in Poland set up 11 lab-based colonies of the ant Myrmica scabrinodis, made up of young worker ants. Within each colony, half of the ants had their life expectancy artificially reduced, either by exposure to carbon dioxide, which acidifies their ...

Tags: ants, biology, mortality

Huge 'Ocean' Discovered Inside Earth

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 17:58:27 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

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.

Looking down deep

The pair analyzed more than 600,000 seismograms—records of waves generated by earthquakes traveling through the Earth—collected from instruments scattered around the planet.

They noticed a region beneath Asia where seismic waves appeared to dampen, or “attenuate,” and also slow down slightly. “Water slows the speed of waves a little,” Wysession explained. “Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.”

“That’s a real back of the envelope type calculation,” Wysession said. “That’s the best that we can do at this point.”

Tags: science, earth, water, ocean

Ancient Blueprints of Calculus Uncovered in Archimedes Text

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 19:20:11 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Details have been released from the nine-year-long reconstruction project to recover the Greek mathematician's writings from this one-of-a-kind find and the results are fascinating.

Buried beneath the surface of this gilded palimpsest, researchers discovered more extensive demonstrations of concepts such as infinite series, approximations, limits, and integral calculus than had been known to exist in ancient times.

Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s. Reviel Netz, an historian of mathematics at Stanford University who transcribed the text, says that the examination of Archimedes' work has revealed "a new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics."

Clip Source: www.sciencenews.org

A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus.

The top layer of writing in this 700-year-old book describes Christian prayers. But underneath, almost obliterated, are the only surviving copies of many of the works of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes.

The picture on the left is an ordinary photograph, with the Archimedes text barely visible. The picture on the right is a multi-spectral image, and the Archimedes text and diagrams are mostly legible.

Sometime after Johan Heiberg examined the book in 1906, someone painted gold-leaf images over four of the pages (left). Multispectral imaging couldn't peer beneath the reflective metal paint, but x-ray fluorescence imaging revealed the underlying text (right).

Archimedes computed the area of the curved figure (left) by enclosing it in a bigger one with straight edges (right). He then examined random slices to compute the volume—using the concept of actual infinity.

Tags: math, science, archimedes, calculus, infinity, greek, ancient, history, x-ray, book

World's oldest wall painting unearthed in Syria

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:47:43 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: French archaeologists have discovered an 11,000-year-old wall painting underground in northern Syria which they believe is the oldest in the world.

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

A view of a painting uncovered at Djade al-Mughara Neolihic site, northeast of the Syrian city of Aleppo, in this September 2007 handout photo. The painting was discovered by a team of French archaeologists, who described the painting as the oldest in the world. (Handout/Reuters)

Tags: archaeology, syria, art, rock art, prehistory

Space, the final frontier

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 18:34:21 GMT

clipped by: righthand

Clip Source: heritage.stsci.edu

Clip Source: heritage.stsci.edu

Tags: images

Eighty million years without sex

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:02:04 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Asexual organisms are usually short-lived

The mystery of how an animal has survived for 80 million years without sex has been solved by UK scientists.

A Cambridge team says the creature owes its existence to a genetic quirk that offers some recompense for its prolonged celibacy.

Many asexual organisms have died out because they cannot adapt to changes in the natural world.

But an evolutionary trick allows this pond-dweller to survive when conditions change, researchers report in Science.

There could be some benefit to millions of years without sex after all

Dr Alan Tunnacliffe, University of Cambridge

The animal is a tiny invertebrate known as a bdelloid rotifer. It lives in freshwater pools. If deprived of water, it survives in a desiccated state until water becomes available again.

The secret to this novel survival mechanism lies in a twist of asexual reproduction, whereby the animal is able to make two separate proteins from two different copies of a key gene.

Tags: biology, genetics, sex, science

Brain Can Only Pay Attention for 40 MInutes

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 04:26:33 GMT

clipped by: AndreaJoRush
clipper's remarks: And I thought I must have ADD (I probably do) because I could not pay attention in graduate math classes for more than about 45 minutes. It seems like I was doing a lot better than I thought!

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Psychologists are finding out that even when people try to focus on a task they tend to lose concentration within 40 minutes, and sometimes as little as 10 minutes. The studies are based on a new technique, called transcranial Doppler sonography, that uses ultrasound to monitor blood flow velocity in the brain. The technique could be turned into a warning system for workers who perform critical tasks -- such as pilots or air traffic controllers -- or even for drivers.

Distractions can break anyone's concentration, but new research shows what happens in your brain can, too.

The phenomenon is such that the more you look, the less you see

transcranial Doppler sonography (TDS). The device measures blood flow velocity in the brain

researchers saw a decrease in blood-flow velocity over time, and, therefore, a decrease in attention

Warm believes the study results can be helpful for the military, security workers, air traffic controllers and many others

Tags: attention, brain, science

Origin of Vision discovered

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:32:10 GMT

clipped by: Oortcloud
clipper's remarks: Very cool stuff.

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

You are reading these words right now because 600 million years ago, an aquatic animal called a Hydra developed light-receptive genes—the origin of animal vision.

It wasn't exactly 20-20 vision back then though.

Hydras, a genus of freshwater animals that are kin to corals and jellyfish, measure only a few millimeters in diameter and have been around for hundreds of millions of years.

Though they don't have eyes or any specific light-receptive organs, researchers think that the light-sensing proteins concentrated in the mouth area of the Hydras help them to use light sensitivity to search out prey.

"We now have a time frame for the evolution of animal light sensitivity," said study leader David Plachetzki, a UC Santa Barbara graduate student. "We know its precursors existed roughly 600 million years ago.

These findings, detailed in a recent issue of the online journal PLoS ONE, counter arguments by anti-evolutionists that evolution can only eliminate traits and cannot produce new features

Tags: origin, vision, sight, eyes, biology, evolution