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looking for the afterlife in all the wrong places

post from weird things on 05 November 2009 03:56:38 PM. © weird things

There are a lot of things in life that are a complete mystery to me. What was the trigger for the Big Bang? What should our civilization do in the future if humans are to survive as a species? Will I ever find that movie theater punch card I lost a few[...]

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http://worldofweirdthings.com/2009/11/05/looking-for-the-afterlife-in-all-the-wro
ng-places/

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Chemists make progress toward "artificial leaf"

post from Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought on 05 November 2009 03:45:51 PM. © Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought

Scientists are making progress toward development of an "artificial leaf" that mimics a real leaf's chemical magic with photosynthesis ? but instead converts sunlight and water into a liquid fuel such as methanol for cars and trucks.

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http://machineslikeus.com/news/chemists-make-progress-toward-artificial-leaf

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Take Me Out to the Ballpark - On Mars!

post from News and Features - NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on 05 November 2009 03:11:00 PM. © News and Features - NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Students in fourth through seventh grade will work to create the ultimate baseball experience "on Mars," even designing the rules for how to play a game on the Red Planet.

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the lucrative business of false profundity

post from weird things on 05 November 2009 02:14:29 PM. © weird things

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Butterfliiiies iiinnnn SPPPAAAAACCCCEEEEE!

post from Bad Astronomy on 05 November 2009 02:00:37 PM. © Bad Astronomy

My friend Bug Girl (an entomologist and Skepchick) sent me a note about a cool opportunity for U.S. east coast teachers: you can participate in a Shuttle experiment involving Monarch butterflies in space!When Atlantis launches next week, it will be[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/M43EF5j6yL4/

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Google Earth your way to big science

post from Physics Buzz on 05 November 2009 01:45:00 PM. © Physics Buzz

I remember how excited I was when Google Maps first came into existence. I would seize anyone who seemed to show a particle of interest, sit them down in front of my computer, and click madly on the little square until I could discern my own house.

Well, Google Maps has grown up quite a bit since then. Now I can satisfy my need to stalk my own house by flying straight home on the wings of Google Earth. When that gets boring, I can zoom way out and give the earth a spin, as if it were an old-fashioned globe, or turn it upside down to check on Antarctica.

Google Earth is also a great way to tour big science in all its glory. How, you ask? Well, first download the program. Then make a list of your dream destinations —Fermilab, CERN, KEK in Japan, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory—and fly to each one.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory makes for a splendid aerial shot, even more impressive than the giant rings of Fermilab's Tevatron or the LHC. The two-mile-long linear accelerator ends in a fan of buildings that once housed enormous detectors that helped scientists probe inside the nucleus, among other things. The smaller ring you see is the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource. You might notice that parts of the lab seem to be under construction— it seems like these images were taken when the lab was excavating for the Linac Coherent Light Source. This year the nearly half-century-old linac was reborn as the world's first hard x-ray free-electron laser.

The SLAC linac from above. Electrons start their journey at the left end.
Conveniently, Interstate 280 spans the accelerator. Use "street-view" to land on the freeway and look down at the accelerator's klystron gallery, the building that houses the accelerator's above-ground workhorses.

The accelerator from the I-280 freeway.
Next, wing it over to Fermilab. You'll see the patchwork of wetlands, woodlands, and grasslands that make up the 6,800-acre campus clearly marked by the distinctive white ring of the Tevatron, flanked by its booster ring. Are those fuzzy brown spots I'm seeing bison? They might be. Check the option for 3D buildings so you don't miss a pretty impressive 3D construction of the lab's famous Wilson Hall, with its curving walls and sentinel of international flags, a reminder of the cosmopolitan nature of particle physics.

Wilson Hall at Fermilab, rendered in 3D.
If the architecture inspires you, why not help Fermilab name their next accelerator? It's called Project X right now, but they're looking for something with a little less science fiction and a little more personality.

Here's a place you may not know much about: KEK, the high-energy physics lab in Tsukuba, Japan. You'll identify it from the air by its ring-shaped accelerator, the powerful KEK-B. It collides electrons and positrons for a collaboration known as BELLE. (Latitude: 36° 9'15.90"N, longitude: 140° 4'18.67"E)

The KEK-B electron-positron collider in Tsukuba, Japan.
Brookhaven National Lab is also distinctive aerially—check out the the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at latitude 40°52'36.42"N, longitude 72°52'19.09"W.

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http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2009/11/google-earth-your-way-to-big-scienc
e.html

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Cassinis Swoop over Enceladus: First Morsels of
Science Coming Back Now

post from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Blog on 05 November 2009 01:09:01 PM. © NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Blog

Bonnie J. BurattiPhew! We made it through the deepest swoop yet down into the plume of Enceladus, the encounter we call “E7″ because it’s the seventh targeted flyby of Enceladus. But now we have our work cut out for the next few weeks as we pore over the data, painstakingly analyzing every signal to understand [...]

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http://blogs.jpl.nasa.gov/?p=58

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Take a Virtual Trip Through The Brain of a Mouse

post from Singularity Hub on 05 November 2009 01:05:29 PM. © Singularity Hub

It may sound like the premise for the next roller coaster ride at Disney Land, but UC San Diego is serious about letting you take a virtual voyage through the brain of a mouse. Their new open source resource, called the Whole Brain Catalog, allows scientists to navigate through a visual model of a mouse [...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SingularityHub/~3/mIxLKm2Mstw/

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Mass extinction blamed on fiery fountains of coal

One of Earth's worst-ever mass extinctions may have been caused by carbon dioxide released by exploding mixtures of magma and coal

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http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/424048/s/6f0a027/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Carti
cle0Cmg20A4273330B20A0A0Emass0Eextinction0Eblamed0Eon0Efiery0Efountains0Eof0Ecoal0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fenvironment/story01.htm

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Frank Schaeffer throws the ‘atheist
fundamentalist’ bomb

Frank Schaeffer really detests most of the New Atheists (except for Dan Dennett; he loves Dennett to pieces). He thinks they're just like the Christian fundamentalists, and he should know, since his father was one of the most fanatical evangelicals around, and he was part of that radical Christianity himself. He starts off with a damning assertion.

The most aggressive members of the "New Atheism" movement have quite a bit in common with religious extremists like Pat Robertson and Ted Haggard.

Whoa. That's a strong accusation. I wonder what these points of commonality are?

I read his whole long complaint, and it boils down to precisely one point of similarity, and even that doesn't hold up: the Richard Dawkins website has an online store, where you can buy his books and a scarlet A pin and t-shirts. That's it. It doesn't even hold up to casual criticism: I don't think a defining characteristic of the money-grubbing fundagelicals like Roberts and Falwell and Robertson and Hagee and so forth is that they give their fans a chance to buy their books…it's that they harangue them for donations, expect that true believers will tithe, and promise magical healing for money or hellfire for apostates. If you've attended any of Dawkins' lectures, you know that he doesn't throw up ads and say "buy my book", and he certainly doesn't bluster out veiled threats if you fail to support the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

All I can say about Schaeffer's definition of a fundamentalist is that under it, if you've opened a Cafe Press store, that makes you the Pope of a money-gouging cult.

There are more gripes. The God Delusion includes a few citations to web sites; Frank is shocked and appalled, and is also really upset about the kids on his lawn. You can buy videos of his interviews on his website store, and in them, he doesn't profess to absolute certainty about the non-existence of gods; he talks with people who like him, with enthusiastic audiences. He doesn't like religion, and he's unconvinced by the anthropic principle. Unfortunately for Schaeffer's premise, these don't necessarily make him a fundamentalist.

It's very peculiar. To get into Frank Schaeffer's good graces, Dawkins apparently must stop selling his books (I wonder…does Schaeffer give his books away for free?), abandon the web (a point Schaeffer is making in an article on the web), take a vow of silence, and be despised by people. He should also look kindly on religion and reject scientific explanations of our origins. In other words, Dawkins must become some kind of medieval anchorite, and only then will Frank Schaeffer respect his sincerity and be his friend.

It's a small price to pay to be pals with such a pleasant person, I'm sure.

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Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/e3RjtFz35Yg/frank_schae
ffer_throws_the_ath.php

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