Hubble Zooms in on a Magnified Galaxy
NASA:
Thanks to the presence of a natural “zoom lens” in space, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope got a uniquely close-up look at the brightest “magnified” galaxy yet discovered.
Not only is that cool as hell, the pictures are amazing.
Science decodes ‘internal voices’
Jason Palmer, BBC News:
[T]he team employed a computer model that helped map out which parts of the brain were firing at what rate, when different frequencies of sound were played.
With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen.
They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant.
Imagine a computer controlled with technology like this.
Swiss ‘Satellite Janitor’ Aims To Clean Up Space Junk
Carl Franzen, writing for TPM’s IdeaLab:
The agency on Wednesday announced that is beginning work on a “janitor satellite” that will begin to clean up Earth’s orbit by latching onto a piece of space debris traveling at 17,400 miles per-hour and dragging it back into Earth’s atmosphere on a suicide mission, causing both the janitor satellite and the piece of junk to burn up.
Franzen also describes just how real the problem of space junk is. (Spoiler: very serious.)
Crystals may be possible in time as well as space
Alexandra Witze, writing in ScienceNews:
In two new papers, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek lays out the mathematics of how an object moving in its lowest energy state could experience a sort of structure in time. Such a “time crystal” would be the temporal equivalent of an everyday crystal, in which atoms occupy positions that repeat periodically in space.
MOTHERFUCKING TIME CRYSTALS WHAT. Even Witze admits the name sounds “like the title of a bad fantasy movie”.
Scientists Claim Brain Memory Code Cracked
ScienceDaily:
Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale.
In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, physicists Travis Craddock and Jack Tuszynski of the University of Alberta, and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona demonstrate a plausible mechanism for encoding synaptic memory in microtubules, major components of the structural cytoskeleton within neurons.
I had the opportunity to see Dr. Hameroff speak at Google in 2007 — you can view a video of that talk here. He’s an interesting fellow with a lot of very interesting ideas — some of which are (as far as I can tell as a layman) somewhat outside the mainstream.
What I’m saying is: check this out, but take it with a grain of salt.
Male Fruit Flies, Spurned by Females, Turn to Alcohol
Benedict Carey, New York Times:
Fruit flies apparently self-medicate just like many humans do, drowning their sorrows or frustrations for some of the same reasons, scientists reported Thursday. Male flies subjected to what amounted to a long tease — in a glass tube, not a dance club — preferred food spiked with alcohol far more than male flies that were able to mate.
The study, posted online in the journal Science, suggests that some elements of the brain’s reward system have changed very little during evolution, and these include some of the mechanisms that support addiction. Levels of a brain chemical that is active in regulating appetite predicted the flies’ thirst for alcohol. A similar chemical is linked to drinking in humans.
What’s really cool is that they think this could help them develop treatments to help people with alcohol and other substance abuse problems. Science!
As journal boycott grows, Elsevier defends its practices
Josh Fischman, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
A protest against Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific journal publisher, is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company’s journals, including refereeing papers.
The boycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday—that Elsevier officials on Tuesday broke their official silence to respond to protesters’ accusations that they charge too much and support laws that will keep research findings bottled up behind a company paywall.
As of the afternoon of the 7th, the online pledge is up to 4,524 people.
With the rise of the internet and along with it the arXiv, the issue of free access to (publicly-funded or otherwise) scientific papers has slowly fomented and come to a head. While arXiv provides access to preprints (i.e. un-peer reviewed copies of papers) it’s difficult to find and search for the final versions of older articles. And if you do find what you’re looking for, there’s no guarantee the paper will remain there long-term.
New Snub-Nosed Monkey Discovered, Eaten
Rachel Kaufman for National Geographic News on October 27, 2010:
A new monkey species in Myanmar is so snub-nosed that rainfall is said to makes it sneeze—but that’s apparently the least of problems.
The only scientifically observed specimen (pictured above) had been killed by local hunters the time researchers found it—and was eaten soon after.
An international team of scientists conducting research in the Amazon River Basin announced the discovery of a formerly unknown primate species inhabiting a remote jungle area roughly 300 miles from Manaus Monday. According to scientists in Manaus, the new species, Ateles saporis, is “an amazing biological find” and “incredibly delectable.”
“We couldn’t be more thrilled!” German researcher Dr. Jerome Keller told reporters Tuesday. “Very few scientists are lucky enough to discover a new species, let alone a mammal with a palatability on par with a tender, juicy steak.”
“This is a seriously tasty creature,” Keller added.
Fungi discovered in the Amazon will eat your plastic
Michael J. Cohen, writing for Fast Company’s Co.Exist blog:
The common plastic is used for everything from garden hoses to shoes and truck seats. Once it gets into the trash stream, it persists for generations. Anyone alive today is assured that their old garden hoses and other polyurethane trash will still be here to greet his or her great, great grandchildren. Unless something eats it.
The fungi, Pestalotiopsis microspora, is the first anyone has found to survive on a steady diet of polyurethane alone and—even more surprising—do this in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment that is close to the condition at the bottom of a landfill.
If this pans out, it could be a huge deal. Of course, now I’m imagining this fungi getting lose and dissolving plastic everywhere, forcing us to invent a new type of plastic that’s impervious to it. AND THE CYCLE CONTINUES…
Is there life on Venus? Not in reprocessed Venera-13 images
Emily Lakdawalla writes on The Planetary Society’s blog about the possibility of life on Venus. You know shit is getting real when the second paragraph begins with this sentence: “The story is so obviously ridiculous that I would ordinarily not give it a second thought.”