Clipmarks | Hypothesis Clips

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Sun, 07 Sep 2008 21:44:32 GMT

Medlock's General Science class did a cool experiment with gummy worms! The students loved it! The purpose of the gummy worm lab is to introduce the scientific method and to investigate the movement of water into and out of the gummy worms. The students had to determine what happens to the gummy worms when they are submerged in water overnight.

Students were first challenged to write a hypothesis statement for the experiment, "What happens when gummy worm is submerged in water for a period of 24 hours?" They used the metric system to measure the "before and after" measurements of the gummy worm in order to test their hypothesis and answer the question.

Students were able to learn to use their measuring skills in length, mass, volume and density and to calculate the differences ("before and after" measurements) in density to be able to answer their questions.
Students had a blast in this experiment and could not believe how much their gummy worm "grew!"

Louis Pasteur

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:51:01 GMT

clipped by: stanstan009

Clip Source: www.kent.k12.wa.us

Louis Pasteur - One of the first to disprove spontaneous generation. A French scientist who proved that micro organisms was carried by dust not air. (French 1864)

Pasteur's Problem

Where do the microbes come from to cause broth to decay.
Hypothesis: Microbes come from cells of organisms on dust particles in the air; not the air itself.

Pasteur put broth into several special S-shaped flasks

Each flask was boiled and placed at various locations

S-shaped Flask

Filled with broth
The special shaped was intended to trap any dust particles coming in.

Flasks boiled

Flasks boiled
Micropes Killed

Flask Left Out

Flask left at various locations
Did not turn cloudy

Microbes not found

Antarctica Yields Fragments of an Ancient Destroyed Planet

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:30:09 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Better to read the whole article. Difficult to clip. Interesting.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

Rocks can be many things: they were probably our earliest weapons, they've been ballast on our journeys of exploration, even modern-art pieces. But a pair recovered from Antarctica may be the grandest application yet - tombstones for an entire world. Lunar and Planetary Institute researcher Allain Treiman believes that them to be pieces of a destroyed dwarf planet, relics from the creation of the solar system.

It'll take more than a royal cavalry regiment to put this proto-planetary Humpty Dumpty together again. It's thought that many of the pieces could be in the asteroid belt between and Jupiter, while others may have impacted on other planets or even been burned up in the Sun. Spectral analysis of asteroids may confirm this hypothesis, but it seems clear that the early solar system was a dangerous place - and we have one more "We were lucky there" coincidence to thank for life as we know it.

Is Planet-scale Geo-Engineering Needed to Reverse Global Warming?

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 01:48:40 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: "This puts a special responsibility on us to stay civilized and give refuge to the unimaginably large influx of climate refugees,' he said, adding that carrying on with 'business as usual' would probably kill most of us this century.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

James Lovelock,the controversial environmental scientist and Oxford professor who developed the Gaia hypothesis of the Earth as a self-regulating organism, warns humans may have to attempt planet-scale engineering of the climate because global warming is happening faster than experts have been predicting.

"Safe forms of 'geo-engineering' should be used if they can buy us a little time to adapt to a rapidly changing climate."

The startling new ideas Lovelock proposes range from artificially altering the climate range from using a constellation of trillions of space craft as a sun-shade or dust particles in the stratosphere to reflect solar energy to 'seeding' the oceans with iron particles to stimulate algae, which absorb CO2.

Scientists at Stanford University reported that a 2 per cent reduction in the amount of sunlight warming the Earth is more than enough to offset a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, and suggested it would be possible to deflect sunlight from the Arctic

Tags: climate change, geo engineering

The Thousand Best Popular-Science Books

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:48:31 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: The site promotes input on selections, but the list looks pretty thorough.

Clip Source: cosmicvariance.com

Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer has cast a baleful eye on the various lists of the world’s greatest books, and decided that we really need is a list of the world’s greatest popular-science books. I think the goal is to find the top 100, but many nominations are pouring in from around the internets, and I suspect that a cool thousand will be rounded up without much problem.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond

Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hoftstadter

Cosmos, Carl Sagan

Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps, Peter Galison

How the Universe Got Its Spots, Janna Levin

Chronos, Etienne Klein

The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman

The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen J. Gould

Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye

The Inflationary Universe, Alan Guth

The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene

Warped Passages, Lisa Randall

The Astonishing Hypothesis, Francis Crick

The Double Helix, James Watson

Prisoner’s Dilemma, William Poundstone

Tags: cock, tail, partly, physics

dreamin' by numbers

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:48:09 GMT

clipped by: zadoz
clipper's remarks: interesting study

Clip Source: women.timesonline.co.uk

What do our dreams mean?

The idea is that during dreaming the brain builds up a model of the world, taking into account what happened in the real world so that strategies can be planned and problems solved.

“The hypothesis is that the biological function of dreaming is to simulate threatening events and to rehearse threat perception and threat avoidance,'' says Dr Antti Revonsuo, a psychologist at the University of Turku. “In the ancestral environment human life was short and full of threats. A dream-production mechanism that tends to select threatening waking events and simulate them over and over again would have been valuable for the development of threat-avoiding skills.'

Dreams in numbers

5-30 minutes the average length of a dream

Every 90min how often we dream at night

33% of dreams convey misfortune

25% of dreams take place in a known location

50% of social interactions in dreams are aggressive, usually towards the dreamer

95% to 99% the proportion of dreams that we forget

Tags: sleep, dreams

What is Science?

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:14:11 GMT

clipped by: skwirlinator

Clip Source: humanknowledge.net

Definition of Science

Science is the study of regular objective phenomena through empirical induction and logical deduction. The scientific method consists of observation and measurement, induction of hypotheses and deduction of consequences, experimental or empirical testing of those consequences, reproducibility of results, and competition for agreement in the marketplace of ideas.

Discovery is the learning of a principle or fact that was already in effect. Invention is the creation of a method or mechanism that was not already in operation. A hypothesis is a rigorous explanation that has not already been proven. 'Theory' can mean either a proven or unproven hypothesis. A fact is a synthetic proposition that is demonstrably true. Principles and facts are discovered (not invented) because they were already in effect. Theories are invented (not discovered) because the explaining that they constitute was not already happening, even though the principle they describe might have been.

Tags: science, discovery, hypothesis, invention, theory, fact

Smart girls eat fish!

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:52:01 GMT

clipped by: bbking13

Clip Source: sciencenow.sciencemag.org

To test this hypothesis, Lassek and Gaulin analyzed data on about 4000 girls and boys between the ages of 6 and 16. The children had participated in the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Study, part of a U.S. project to assess the health and nutritional status of kids and adults. After the researchers controlled for the parents' income and education and for the children's age, race, number of siblings, and blood lead levels, they found that girls who ate more omega-3 scored significantly better on four cognitive tests, including an IQ test.

Although genetics and parental education influence intelligence far more, the dietary effect explained about 1% of the difference in test scores between girls, about the same amount as exposure to lead, says Lassek. Boys also perform a bit better on cognitive tests if they eat more omega-3s than other fatty acids, but the effect is "twice as great in girls as in boys,"

Tags: statistics

Computer model of bees probes the hive mind

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:46:55 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: Thenius believes the foragers may be picking up clues about the quality of sources from their interactions with receivers. If some foragers have found a bountiful new source, the receivers have more work to do, so average unloading times across all foragers increase. This delay might suggest the existence of a better nectar source than the one a given forager has been visiting. Similarly, receivers are sometimes already half-full from another bee's nectar when a new forager arrives, so a forager needs to unload to more than one receiver. If this occurs more frequently, it may also suggest that a richer nectar source has been found.
To test this hypothesis, Thenius's team built a computer simulation of a hive containing 5000 independent virtual bees. Each forager started out visiting one of two different flower patches, but would switch destinations if it had to wait too long to be unloaded or was being serviced by too many receivers.

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

GIVEN a choice between two different flower beds, how can honeybees hunting for nectar be sure they've chosen the best patch? A new computer model may provide the answer, as well as insights into the workings of a "hive mind" that could be used to guide swarms of robots.

Within a bee colony, two different types of bee handle nectar: foragers go out to collect it from flowers, and receivers unload it from the foragers and store it in honeycomb. The forager then leaves the hive to hunt for more.

Different foragers from a single hive visit more than one separate source of nectar - so how can an individual forager be sure it's going to the best one? While bees can communicate with each other using complicated waggle dances, "these only show where a source is - not how good it is", says Ronald Thenius of the University of Graz in Austria.

Tags: bees, computers, hive, mind

The importance of exposure

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:49:11 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: this study points out to the importance of one's environment.
one should be very selective of where she chooses to be.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Simply Listening To Music Affects One’s Musicality

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) have demonstrated how much the brain can learn simply through active exposure to many different kinds of music.

“It turns out that mere exposure makes an enormous contribution to how musical competence develops.”

The common view among music scientists is that musical abilities are shaped mostly by intense musical training, and that they remain rather rough in untrained listeners, the so-called Expertise hypothesis.

However, the UvA-study shows that listeners without formal musical training, but with sufficient exposure to a certain musical idiom (the Exposure hypothesis), perform similarly in a musical task when compared to formally trained listeners.

Furthermore, the results show that listeners generally do better in their preferred musical genre.

Just listen and learn!

Tags: music, neuroscience

Five revolutionary minds

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:19:13 GMT

clipped by: sylviadafox

Clip Source: revminds.seedmagazine.com

Fernando Esponda

"What caught my eye was that the information being used by the immune system was a negative kind of information," he says. That is, the immune system doesn't have a record of every possible pathogen that could invade the body. Instead, it learns what the body itself looks like and knows to go on the offensive when it encounters anything that doesn't match its definition of "self." "Can we do the same thing with data?"

Reverse surveys reveal only a little about each subject but a lot about a population, and they can accurately estimate how common a behavior is without anyone having to admit to it.

Clip Source: revminds.seedmagazine.com

The mainstream approach to cognition holds that it happens in the mind and that material culture is nothing more than an outgrowth of our mental capacities. Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris is challenging this deep-seated idea

the hypothesis of extended mind, which posits that material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but an actual part of it.

Clip Source: revminds.seedmagazine.com

Aleksandra Walczak

Tags: ideas, science

Elephants' Legendary Memories Help Herds Survive

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:07:58 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: The call is for extra protection for the older females (the ones with the biggest tusks). They remember where water is during droughts.

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Elephants really do have a memory like, well, an elephant.

Elephant matriarchs seem to retain memories of distant, life-sustaining sources of food and water, a new study suggests. These memories could be key to the survival of their family groups during lean times.

"Understanding how elephants and other animal populations react to droughts will be a central component of wildlife management and conservation," said lead author of the study, Charles Foley, of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). "Our findings seem to support the hypothesis that older females with knowledge of distant resources become crucial to the survival of herds during periods of extreme climatic events."

The researchers hope the study will underline the importance of protecting the leaders of elephant herds, as well as the vulnerability of the herds to increased drought brought about by climate change.

Tags: nature, is, like, an, egg - often, poached

Out-of-This-World Hypothesis: Cosmic Forces Control Life on Earth

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:43:54 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Worth a read, if you enjoy info about what is happening in the Space around us.

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

The rise and fall of species on Earth might be driven in part by the undulating motions of our solar system as it travels through the disk of the Milky Way, scientists say.

Two years ago, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley found the marine fossil record shows that biodiversity-the number of different species alive on the planet-increases and decreases on a 62-million-year cycle. At least two of the Earth's great mass extinctions-the Permian extinction 250 million years ago and the Ordovician extinction about 450 million years ago-correspond with peaks of this cycle, which can't be explained by evolutionary theory.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of Kansas (KU) have come up with an out-of-this-world explanation. Their idea hinges upon the fact that, appearances aside, stars are not fixed in space. They move around, sometimes rushing headlong through galaxies, or approaching close enough to one another for brief cosmic trysts.

Tags: great, theory

Did Upright Walking Start in Trees?

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:18:31 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: So, our ancestors copied the tree dwellers.

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Maybe walking upright on two legs isn't such a defining human feature after all. Scientists who spent a year photographing orangutans in the rain forest say the trait probably evolved in ancient apes navigating the treetops long before ancestors of humans climbed to the ground -- a hypothesis that contradicts science museums the world over.

But it's more in tune with fossil evidence, contends Robin Crompton of the University of Liverpool, who co-authored the report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

“An increasing number of people have been questioning this old 'up from the apes' idea'' of how bipedalism evolved, Crompton said.

The popular explanation: Some chimpanzee-like creature that dragged its knuckles on the ground descended from trees into grasslands, and gradually straightened up to walk like modern humans.

Tags: two, legs, = sore, back

Top 10 Mad Scientists

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:55:37 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: An absolutely respectable club. The kind of madness we all need.

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

From mildly eccentric to downright wacky, these 10 hyper-intelligent characters didn't just march to a different beat, they each played their own tune altogether, all while changing how we look at the world.

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Johann Konrad Dippel

Wernher von Braun

Robert Oppenheimer

Freeman Dyson

Richard Feynman

Jack Parsons

James Lovelock

This modern environmental scientist and inventor of the world-as-superorganism Gaia Hypothesis

Nikola Tesla

Leonardo da Vinci

Albert Einstein

Tags: science, history