Clipmarks | arifsali's 'science' clips

Neanderthals may have talked

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:41:37 GMT

clipped by: ezsparky

Neanderthals may have talked

A DNA analysis shows Neanderthals share with humans two key changes in the FOXP2 gene known to be involved in speech, raising the possibility the species possessed some prerequisites for language, the researchers said.

But many as yet unknown genes may also underlie the capacity for language, the researchers added.

Tags: neanderthals, religion, talk, dna, science, biology

American Public Education, Material Science and Religious beliefs

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:03:01 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: Just wrote this blog post, recommend you read at the source to get the point.

On Pg 103 of Embracing Mind, B. Allan Wallace writes (and I find this interesting on the topic of public education in America).

Clip Source: webwanderings.wordpress.com

Due to this biased attitude, Americans remain largely ignorant of all but their own personal spiritual beliefs–and this in an age when religion and politics have become thoroughly mixed on the international stage. There seems to be a misplaced fear that if, say, a religious believer were brought into a classroom to explain why he believed in his creed and what his religion meant to him personally, this would appear to be promoting religion. The U.S.Constitution originally forbade the promotion of religion in order to avoid the creation of an official state religion such as the Church of England. Its intent was not to stifle spirituality. Forcing all the children in a classroom to recite or listen to the Lord’s Prayer each day would indeed be the promotion of an official religion, but allowing children to describe their own spiritual beliefs, or lack of belief, and to be exposed to other beliefs does not promote any particular religion.

Tags: religion, science, education, america

Science blogs can advance academic process

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:45:41 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.ox.ac.uk

Science blogs should be embraced by universities and research institutions as powerful tools to advance scientific collaboration and reach out to the public, says a group of bloggers including Nick Anthis from the University of Oxford. They outline their argument in an article published in PLoS Biology.

There are an estimated 1200 science blogs in existence – web-logs written about science or written by practicing scientists – that already form a thriving online science community. The immediacy, interactivity, and reach of blog posts can distill the importance of new findings in an accessible way or provide a forum to discuss new results.

'There’s no doubt blogs can play a powerful role in the academic process,' says Anthis, who blogs on science and politics as The Scientific Activist.

Tags: science, blogs

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

Sid the Science Kid

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:35:12 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: Good show if you have young kids.

Clip Source: muppet.wikia.com

Sid the Science Kid is an upcoming preschool television series being produced by The Jim Henson Company. The show will feature real-time computer-generated puppets, using the Henson Digital Performance System.

The main character in the show is Sid, an "inquisitive youngster" who uses comedy to tackle questions kids have about basic scientific principals and why things work the way they do. He tries to answer questions and solve problems with the help of his classmates (Gabriela, May and Gerald), his teacher (Susie), his parents (Alice and Mort), his Grandma and even his baby brother (Zeke).

The conceptual content of Sid is based in national science learning standards, cognitive learning theory, and on the preschool science curriculum, Preschool Pathways to Science.^[4]

Humans cause climate change, US body accepts

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:10:32 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: environment.newscientist.com

AS THE Bush administration enters its final months, the US Climate Change Science Program has issued a report concluding that computer models do effectively simulate climate. It also accepts that the models show human activity was responsible for the rapid warming of the 20th century.

The report is the 10th of 21 due to be issued by the body, which the sceptical Bush administration set up late in 2002 to review the validity of climate-change science before making policy decisions. At the time, environmentalists accused the administration of using the programme as a way to drag its feet on the issue.

"The evidence is pretty convincing that the models give a good simulation of climate," lead author David Bader of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California told reporters last week. He concedes that the report did not examine predictions of future climate change. Nor did it address policy issues, which will be left to the next administration.

Tags: environment, bush administration

Einstein was right, McGill astrophysicists say

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:30:45 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.mcgill.ca

Observations of unique twin-pulsar star system show effects of general relativity

Researchers at McGill University’s Department of Physics - along with colleagues from several countries - have confirmed a long-held prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, via observations of a binary-pulsar star system. Their results will be published July 3 in the journal Science.

Pulsars are small, ultradense stellar objects left behind after massive stars die and explode as supernovae. They typically have a mass greater than that of our Sun, but compressed to the size of a city like Montreal. They spin at staggering speeds, generate huge gravity fields and emit powerful beams of radio waves along their magnetic poles. These illuminate Earth-based radio-telescopes like rotating lighthouse beacons as the pulsar spins. More than 1,700 pulsars have been discovered in our galaxy

Tags: science, einstein

Doctors Find Meditation Affects Your Body

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:44:51 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: A Preliminary Study Shows Meditating Turns off Stress-Related Genes

Clip Source: abcnews.go.com

It turns out peaceful thoughts really can influence our bodies, right down to the instructions we receive from our DNA, according to a new study.

Researchers for the study, published in the Public Library of Science, took blood samples from a group of 19 people who habitually meditated or prayed for years, and 19 others who never meditated.

The researchers ran genomic analyses of the blood and found that the meditating group suppressed more than twice the number of stress-related genes -- about 1,000 of them -- than the nonmeditating group.

The more these stress-related genes are expressed, the more the body will have a stress response like high blood pressure or inflammation. Over long periods of time, these stress responses can worsen high blood pressure, pain syndromes and other conditions.

By the end of the training, the novice meditating group was also suppressing stress-related genes, although at lower levels than those of the long-term meditating people.

Tags: meditation, science, research

Top 10 Most Controversial Non-Fiction Books

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 05:27:17 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: listverse.com

The Hoax of the 20th Century

The Population Bomb

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail

Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?

The Skeptical Environmentalist

Hitler’s Willing Executioners

Silent Spring

The Bell Curve

Hitler’s Pope

The Holy Bible

Tags: books, non-fiction

Ultraviolet gives view inside real ‘death star’

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:42:12 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.ox.ac.uk

Scientists have, for the first time, observed a flash of ultraviolet light from within a dying star giving vital evidence of how stars turn into supernovae.

Flash of ultraviolet light revealing the death throes of a star

An international team, including nine scientists from Oxford University, combined data from ground-bound telescopes observing visible light from supernovae with data from a space telescope looking for an earlier peak in ultraviolet light from an associated dying star. They were able to spot telltale signs of the shockwave that forms within a star before it explodes into a supernova. A report of the work appears in this week’s Science.

Scientists have been trying to catch such an event happening for decades

Dr Kevin Schawinski

Tags: science, stars, galaxy

I See Doomed People

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:45:46 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: Critics have given this movie some awful reviews.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

The director of The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan, talks about his scientific and environmental inspirations

In M. Night Shyamalan's film Signs, the protagonist suffers a crisis of faith so deep that it takes an alien invasion of Earth for him to work it out. In Shyamalan's latest movie, The Happening, which opens today, the protagonist suffers a crisis of reason. Unfortunately, this time not even the looming extinction of humanity resolves it for him.

Given that it's mass entertainment, the film raises a lot of interesting questions about science, and it's clear from it that Shyamalan's interest in science goes much deeper than a superficial mining of ideas for plotlines. His protagonist, high school biology teacher Elliot Moore (played by Mark Wahlberg), lectures about the limits of science's ability to explain the world and applies his critical faculties to staying alive when the "happening" happens.

Tags: science, environment, movies

Science of Mentos-Diet Coke explosions explained

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 23:04:44 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

The startling reaction between Diet Coke and Mentos sweets, made famous in thousands of YouTube videos, finally has a scientific explanation. A study in the US has identified the prime factors that drive the fizzy plumes from Coke bottles: the roughness of the sweet and how fast it plummets to the bottle's base.

[Video]

"If you drop a pack of Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, you get this huge fountain of spray and Diet Coke foam coming out," says Tonya Coffey, a physicist at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. "This was a good project for my students to study because there was still some mystery to it."

Experiments in a 2006 edition of the Discovery Channel programme Mythbusters suggested the chemicals responsible for the reaction are gum arabic and gelatine in the sweets, and caffeine, potassium benzoate and aspartame in the Coke. But there have been no rigorous scientific studies of the reaction until now.

Tags: science, soda, sweet

Readers' Q&A: The science of sex

Wed, 14 May 2008 04:41:57 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: Some good and interesting QAs at the source

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

A couple of weeks ago we ran a review of Mary Roach's latest book, Bonk: The curious coupling of science and sex, in which Roach explains how scientists have tackled human sexuality using strange and often hilarious experiments. We invited readers to send in their sex questions for Mary Roach, and you can read a selection of the Q&As below.

Does the female orgasm serve a biological purpose?

Tags: science, sex

An interview with Ken Wilber - You are the river

Thu, 15 May 2008 05:15:10 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: The integral philosopher explains the difference between religion, New Age fads and the ultimate reality that traditional science can't touch.

Clip Source: www.salon.com

Ken Wilber may be the most important living philosopher you've never heard of. He's written dozens of books but you'd be hard-pressed to find his name in a mainstream magazine. Still, Wilber has a passionate -- almost cultlike -- following in certain circles, as well as some famous fans. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have praised Wilber's books. Deepak Chopra calls him "one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness." And the Wachowski brothers asked Wilber, along with Cornel West, to record the commentary for the DVDs of their "Matrix" movies.

A remarkable autodidact, Wilber's books range across entire fields of knowledge, from quantum physics to developmental psychology to the history of religion. He's steeped in the world's esoteric traditions, such as Mahayana Buddhism, Vedantic Hinduism, Sufism and Christian mysticism.

Tags: philosophy, author, religion, science

The Brain Is Not Modular

Wed, 14 May 2008 04:32:25 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: What fMRI Really Tells Us

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Metaphors, modules and brain-scan pseudoscience

The atom is like a solar system, with electrons whirling around the nucleus like planets orbiting a star. No, actually, it isn’t. But as a first approximation to help us visualize something that is so invisible, that image works as a metaphor.

Science traffics in metaphors because our brains evolved to grasp intuitively a world far simpler than the counterintuitive world that science has only recently revealed. The functional activity of the brain, for example, is nearly as invisible to us as the atom, and so we employ metaphors. Over the centuries the brain has been compared to a hydraulic machine (18th century), a mechanical calculator (19th century) and an electronic computer (20th century). Today a popular metaphor is that the brain is like a Swiss Army knife, with specialized modules for vision, language, facial recognition, cheating detection, risk taking, spirituality and even God.

Tags: brain, science