March 2012
51 posts
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Wind energies future? Wind 'flocks' 1000ft Up. →
What a very very good idea.
Earths age off by some millions - great! →
I’ve been discussing the Earth’s age and evolution generally with creationists. They usually let it be known that scientific measurements are probably wrong. Well they were. But for myself that the scientific community actually attempts to and quite often does falsify a hypothesis or theory is one of the strengths science brings to the table. This process of test and observe, throwing...
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New Ideas about the Earth's Birth : Bruce...
What on Earth! Hot news on our planet’s formation
It’s time we got to the core of our planet’s early history. Derringdos
As of today, the world might have changed forever.
A fundamental assumption underpinning much of modern geochemistry is that the earth has the same composition as a class of meteorites called chondrites. These are small fragments of rock-like, primeval material that have...
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Watch“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” asks Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In this breathtaking talk she describes some of the extraordinary projects — a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm controlled by thought, and, well, the internet — that her agency has created by not worrying that they...
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WatchThis may have been blogged all over the internet but today was the first time I’d seen the video. Literally amazing science, redefining the physiology of the human species. It will be interesting to monitor this tech over the coming years.
Heart Stop Beating is the story of Billy Cohn & Bud Frazier, two visionary doctors from the Texas Heart Institute, who in March of 2011 successfully...
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WatchApe must say Taylor talks about himself a lot …but Ape believes that’s because Ape desire the abilities he has and his IQ percentile. He is only 17 and has achieved as much as most do in a life time of scientific inquiry…humility may kick in or he may just be an affable Sheldon Cooper. Ape is happy for him.
“At age 10, he built his first bomb out of a pill bottle and...
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How Old is The Earth? →
How is it that we still need articles explaining something we’ve known for over a century…Genesis is wrong, an unsurprising epic failure by bronze age goat herders to anticipate how the Earth was actually created, the time frame involved or the fact that one day scientific method would uncover this knowledge held in the rocks they often slung at each other while engaged in genocidal...
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First step toward creating a 3D artificial brain →
futurist-foresight:
And so it begins, perhaps? 3D artificial brain today. Tomorrow, neural uploads?
Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg have taken the first step in creating a three-dimensional model of the brain by attaching neurons to a positively charged nanocellulose scaffold.
The purpose is to understand Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s...
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The connectome.
Truly amazing work on the material state consciousness is. With advances in other areas like computing and even 3D printing, how long before this type of work will lead to advances in AI only conceived of in sci-fi like Star Trek. If you’re a fan, the coincidence that Seung phonetically shares his name with Data’s creator Noonien Soong is quixotically energizing.
The image below...
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Graphene dreams →
Graphene is a single, flat layer of carbon atoms packed tightly into a two-dimensional honeycomb arrangement. The in-plane (two-dimensional) carbon-carbon bonds in graphene are the strongest bonds known to science. It is these bonds that give graphene its unbelievable mechanical strength and flexibility.
In the latest graphene-related research – released last week – researchers from Vanderbilt...
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Diamonds are for 70mil Light Years →
A team of Australian and European astronomers has discovered a highly unusual galaxy in the shape of an emerald-cut diamond roughly 70 million light years away.
The astronomers – from Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Finland – discovered the formation within a group of 250 galaxies.
“In the universe around us, most galaxies exist in one of three forms: spheroidal [a three-dimensional...
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Consciousness Online →
Want to know more about you!
Ape love brain and brain love Ape. So finding out about Ape brains is very very interesting indeed. A nice man, named David Chalmers a philosopher at the Australian National University, who is interested in brains, has gathered an impressive collection of online articles and papers (7734 of them) and chucked them up all on one page. They are all about consciousness....
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Anthropology: The Lost Science →
I gave up on Anthropology ten years ago and they are still discussing the same issues that befuddled the discipline then and the twenty years before that.
It would seem that ‘progress’ is still very much a dirty word.
What use is a science that abandons strict scientific method, is wary of objective conclusions and has problems relating its data or developing its hypotheses in...
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WatchJonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence
Ape found the talk interesting in light of the global focus on the one percenters and the ninety-nine percenters. As I listened to the talk unfold, leading up to the animations regarding the co-operators, the exploiters and the super organisms, I found myself thinking this guy is describing the evolution of the corporate...
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WatchFrom Astronomy Sky’s the Limit, ARJclips on Vimeo..
Timelapse videos depicting the stars from low earth orbit, as viewed from the International Space Station. Images edited using Adobe Lightroom with some cropping to make the stars the focal point of each shot, and with manipulation of the contrast to bring out the stars a bit more.
Music: “Truck out There” by London PM.
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Defining Humans Becomes Harder →
The origin of the human species remains one of the most fascinating and difficult topics of modern science.
One of the main reasons for this is a continuing lack of agreement about how we should define ourselves. In other words, what is it that makes us human (or, scientifically, Homo sapiens)?
The father of biological classification, 18th century Swede Carl Linnaeus, wrote in his Systema...
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WatchHumans may escape the death of their planet. But where do you run, in a universe where everything is expanding away from everything else?
Thanks to Space dot com.
Ever thought life was a meaningless, purposeless march toward oblivion. You were right! What you do after truly getting that point is what will define your existence while you have it, the dawn of new meanings and processes will fill...
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WatchThe active sun cycle gave skywatchers a thrill on March 12, 2012 at Abisko National Park in Sweden. Chad Blakley captured the striking aurora borealis in its full glory.
Of course the recent solar flares deserve our thanks.
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WatchIn his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams — for construction, surveying disasters and far more.
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WatchThe Turing Test
It was in a 1950 paper that Turing held, most fully and confidently, that computers would, in time, be programmed to acquire abilities rivalling human intelligence. Even where he saw difficulties and was doubtful about what could be achieved, he advocated experiment. He saw this not a dogma, but as an important conjecture, to guide future research.
The paper has many aspects to...
WARP DEATH
Flying Faster Than the Speed of Light Could Create Deadly Explosions on Arrival - http://pulse.me/s/6W7oV
Warp drives could destroy the Enterprise’s destination!! That’s a clear violation of the prime directive.
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Smart apes #1- Einstein's Spacetime →
There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity.
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WatchDirector Drew Berry told us about the blending his scientific work and Björk’s music:
The “Hollow” music video is a powers-of-10 exploration of the microscopic and and molecular landscapes inside Björk’s body. The animation was constructed from molecular models of DNA and proteins derived from various forms of scientific data such as x-ray crystallography.
My work is...
